Offshore Oil Rigs and Government?

Hello, everybody. Mom's cold is almost gone and my leg is better every day. We did some cleaning today and then we started looking up information on offshore oil rigs.

How come, you ask? Well, we keep hearing about that Deepwater Horizon rig and all the oil that's polluting the Gulf of Mexico, so we wanted to see just how those wells were made in the first place. Anatomy of an Offshore Rig. Totally fascinating, especially the guided tour of the Elgin-Franklin rig and it's accomodations. And the Girrasol off the coast of Angola is pretty deep, probably closer to the Deepwater Horizon in statistics. The site is French, but the lectures are in English.

And then we wanted to learn more about this particular oil spill, especially after we found out that's it's not nearly as big as the one in Kuwait in 1991 (520 million gallons). And Exxon-Valdez was actually one of the smallest of the major spills, with Campeche Bay (Mexico), Brittany (France) and Cornwall (England)considerably larger. One of today's articles suggested "cronyism". Huh? In our government? Pshaw and perish the thought, right? Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill . (click on the pink link, Grandpa, so you can read about it, ok?)

Personally, I think the current "administration" thinks us American puppies and people are really stupid and that we'll believe anything they try to sell...er, I mean TELL....us. The stuff we learned today, along with the government's own site regarding similar incidents just reinforces our opinion. In the left hand menu click on "10 Famous Spills".

Oh yes. And here is a Live Feed of the Gulf Oil Spill which doesn't look like anything is moving but you can see a dark cloud, a light, bubbles....maybe even fish....if you watch for a while. I think I saw a crab until it all exploded again and got dark. Note: Around 10:00PM we saw the robots approach and try to fix the leak. We could even read the names of the manufacturers of the equipment. One of the units had "Titanic" written on it. The cameras change position so sometimes you see action, other times you just see bubbles.

From your reporter on the ground,

In Temecula, CA...

This is Mary-Margaret O'Brien signing off.