Historical Fall 2010 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
The oil spill. Make that THE OIL SPILL. Yep, as I write, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of gallons are gushing out each day. That’s thousands with lots of plurals.
In fact, no one really knows how much oil has escaped. What we do know is that BP (that’s short for Bloody Painful) has consistently underestimated the size of the leak.
The most recent estimate I have is that 1,260,000 gallons of oil per day are escaping from the broken well. Say it slowly: one million, two hundred, and sixty thousand. That’s a lot of grease! (Say, do you think that the smaller numbers given by BP might have something to do with the fact that the size of the penalty they will pay is related to the size of the leak? No, I didn’t think so either.) But here we are: oil is jettisoning out by the minute, thousands of feet below the surface of the sea, and more thousands of feet below the floor of the ocean. Sure it’s a technological marvel, but that’s the way it is with technology: It’s great when it works. So now what?
There are two very important jobs that need to be done.
First, we must plug the leak. Second, we must collect all of the oil. Third, we must get a new haircut for Sarah Palin. (I was just checking to see if you’re paying attention.) Stopping the leak is actually fairly easy, I’m told. Apparently it wouldn’t take that much firepower to bomb the leak.
This would collapse the rocks and diffuse the pressure which is what is causing the oil to shoot with such a venom.
The good news is that the oil leak would stop.
The bad news is that BP would no longer be able to extract oil for business purposes. Yep, you can see why this solution ain’t gonna be use. Plugging the leak is much harder than it might seem because of the depth of water, the pressure at that depth, and the temperature.
This is not like swimming to the bottom of the pool to get a coin on the way to earn a merit badge.
But still, it can’t be that hard! Can it?
My proposal stems from my usual problem-solving mode: The solution is often under our noses (and no, it’s not a mustache).
All too often we look for the complex conclusion or the esoteric answer, when the real solution is right in front of us. Simple is better, so before going to Estonia to find an equation, we should look in East St. Louis.
With that logic in mind – What is everyone overlooking? – I propose that we plug the leak by dropping I-Hop Pancakes on it.
I don’t mean a plateful; I mean thousands upon thousands of buttermilk pancakes.
If you’ve ever had I-Hop pancakes, you know exactly what I mean. Regardless of how light and wispy those puckers seem on the menu, once they’re in the belly, it feels like the maple syrup has turned to metal.
I speak from first-hand experience. Once I had a quick pick-me-up breakfast of 20-25 short stake buttermilk pancakes. (That seems like a lot, but they’re small, maybe only 6” in diameter or so.) Anyway, after my light breakfast – to be fair, I added butter and whipped cream, but I did use lo-cal syrup – I could hardly move. So dropping thousands of buttermilk pancakes on the leak would definitely do the trick, even without the syrup.
The syrup, as I think about it, would probably serve as some sort of glue too, thus furthering the strength of the plug.
Now that we’ve stopped the leak – way to go, I-Hop! – What do we do about the thousands of gallons floating throughout the gulf? One solution is to simply light the oil, creating a wonderful floating fire. Efficient as that may be, I reject it purely on global warming grounds. Or maybe it’s global warning wave? (Get it?) In any case, setting all of that oil afire cannot be good for anyone or anything. Besides, it would trigger smoke alarms from Mississippi to Manitoba. Other strategies, each of which has already been rejected, include scraping the oil off the surface, containing the oil spill through the use of giant logs disguised as Q-tips, and using electric fans to push the oil to the coastline of some other country.
As I said, these ideas have been discounted – but I have learned that the government is shipping huge wind turbine fans from Kansas to Florida. Go figure!
The best and the brightest weighed in on this, and have come to consensus about how to proceed.
The winning tack is to collect the oil by dropping hair, oatmeal, and Pringles into it. Apparently each of these items is super-absorbent, so much so that they’d fill with oil and then slowly sink to the bottom of the ocean.
The ocean’s surface would be clear and clean, and who cares about the bottom anyway? Out of sight, out of mind, as mom always used to say.
The coastline will recover, even though it will take years, and the animal population will regenerate, even though it will also take years. Even BPs stock will rise again (though that will only take months, not years).
The real loser may be President Obama.
We are continually disappointed when we learn that he’s only human.
He didn’t cause the oil leak, and he’s pressuring BP as best he can.
Some things are out of his control, but we don’t want to contemplate that.
We elected a superman, and how we await him to leap tall buildings at a single bound. By now it’s clear that he isn’t superman, and that this is a real mess. So how will it end, beyond the pancakes and Pringles? Here’s a hint: Don’t buy any BP stock. Here’s another hint. Do buy stock in Obama.
Finally, anyone want to join me at the I-Hop for breakfast?
They make a mean pancake!
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, Fall 2010.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2010_09.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
