Tired of being mixed up between gallons, imperial or US, barrels of oil and flow rate?
Let’s go metric to help us understand the scale of the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico.
The inner diameter of the pipe (the riser) is 20 inches or 0,508 meters
Which gives us a surface at the mouth of the pipe of 0,203 m2
This means that one meter of pipe carries 203 liters of oil.
The experts and scientists are all falling over each other attempting to calculate the flow rate. A Federal Team was even created on the 20th May 2010 in order to determine the flow rate !!!
One meter per second of flow, would give us 60 meters per minute and 3,6 km per hour. About the walking speed of a normal man.
That small flow rate of one meter per second gives us 600 metric tons* of oil per hour and 14400 metric tons per 24 hour period.
In a 30 day period: 432 000 metric tons or more than one and a half AMOCO CADIZ Do you want to know more? per month.
At that rate, it has already over-passed the IXTOC more oil spill of 480,000 metric tons on the 23rd of May.
At that rate if will reach the level of the first Gulf War spills of 1,5 MILLION TONS more at the beginning of August 2010.
And this is only based on a rate of flow of 1 meter per second!
It is shocking to find out that BP has refused to allow scientists to perform more accurate, independent measurements of the flow, claiming that it is not relevant to the response and that such efforts might distract from efforts to stem the flow.
But then, everything in the situation is shocking and disgusting.
“A jolly bad job that definitely deserves a slap on the wrist!”