Off Post On The Oil Slick.

Off Post On The Oil Slick.
We see a lot on TV involving the executives of the companies involved, various political figures from The President down, and boards of investigators and lawyers to determine such things as criminal negligence, and who has to pay what to whom. These are all worthwhile activities, but neither the business management guys nor the politicians are the ones I would expect to have the serious advantage in deciding how to deal with the oil leak. That is the real and foremost problem, even more than the horror of trying to clean up Pensacola before the tourists get there. To solve that problem, my background among working class engineers leads me to believe the people who know best how to fix that machine are the guys who built it, and who are out there every day working it. That would be not the CEO of BP, nor some Federal suit sent down there by a Senatorial committee, but the guys who live there and know every bolt and tube of that huge and terribly dangerous machine, like the crew of a submarine.

The GOP’s obstructionists-as-usual who last year were accusing President Obama of acting like a Fascist taking command of errant businesses are now yelling that he is a weakling because he has not taken Fascist command of the international corporations involved in this dreadful mishap. It appears to me he has arrived at the same street-smart conclusion that I did, and with his usual serene class, is letting the company’s engineers do it, while the pundits and the polits babble on about who is to blame, and how to vote next fall. It is quite likely that the first people he called a month ago included Robert Ballard, the deep-water expert who found Titanic, and a couple of nuclear subs working with US Navy dark ops. He would know the what and where of every piece of deep-water research and engineering equipment in both civilian science and military operations, anywhere in the world. If anybody had retrodesigned USO alien underwater technology, he would know about it. The next call was likely his CNO, the Chief Of Naval Operations, of whom he would ask the same question, “What do we have, secret or not, that has the capacity to work down there?” He would immediately inform the BP operations commander on the job at the site that certain resources were available, and would be brought in if they wanted them.

If I were President, when I heard that the reasonable-sounding idea of putting a big funnel over the pipe and sucking the oil right up it and into a tanker ship was not working because ice was forming inside it, I would have called that CNO and told him to immediately, like in 24 hours, inform me of which nuclear powered US Navy ship could be sent fastest to that accident site. That ship, whether a submarine or an aircraft carrier, would proceed there immediately, and get with that BP operations chief and work out the fastest way to use the ship’s nuclear power plant to create the largest amount of the hottest water possible, and to get it piped down to that capture chamber. It would be best if it was an aircraft carrier, where the jet jock students at Pensacola could fly out to conduct their carrier landing qualifications, and where The President could fly out there in Marine One and declare “Mission Accomplished” when it worked.

As for cleaning up the mess, I believe the answer lies in the power of American entrepreneurism. Last I heard, somebody was paying somebody about $75 a barrel for the stuff coming out of that hole, which is also known as crude oil we measure our lives in barrels of. How about if BP agreed to set up collection stations, and would pay anybody $75 a barrel for all of it they can bring in? I think the way to clean up the oil is not to tax us and pay somebody to treat it as toxic waste and get rid of it somewhere. The way to clean it up is to let Americans harvest it. Let the Junkyard Wars guys, and Adam and Jamie the Mythbusters, and the bayou boys who build those wonderful mud racers get ahold of the problem.

Here’s an answer I figure might be worth trying: you make a ten thousand gallon tank that sits in the hold of your little boat, which is basically just a hull for the tank, made like a fiberglass swimming pool. That would be a tank only about as big as an RV, really private-enterprise small boat stuff. On the front of the boat is a big suction scoop, which lies on the surface like a wide and flat vacuum cleaner, hooked up to a pump. You move through the oil slick and suck up the top surface of oil and water. That mixture is pumped into your tank. The tank is closed on the top, but has an opening at the bottom. As the oil and water separate, the tank is filled with oil from the top down. When it is full of oil, you close the vent on the bottom and proceed to the BP receiving station. 10,000 gallons is about 200 barrels, which at $75 a barrel is $15,000. Even if BP paid only $1 a gallon for the stuff, that would still be $10,000 a trip, which is enough to motivate unemployed guys who used to go out for shrimp. With floating oil and underwater plumes to be harvested only a few miles offshore, a boat that size could likely make four trips a day, working in four-man crews round the clock in shifts. It would be hard and dirty work, but they could make a pretty good working-class nickel. That is a policy that would really create jobs, lots of them, especially among those who have lost their fishing jobs. No government program I know of could possibly equal the ability to actually go pick up and recycle that spilled oil faster than just paying Americans to go get it. Even the entire Coast Guard does not have the ability to clean up as much of it as a couple hundred of such little boats… or a couple thousand.

James Nathan Post

Here is a song I wrote 30 years ago about working on the Texas Tower. Performed by “Sarah’n’Dippity.”


THE LONELY TEXAS TOWER