Do you guys remember when I talked about oil spills a couple weeks ago?

At the end of that post, I posed this question:
Now, if Mexico can stop an oil spill that happened at a depth of more than 11,000 feet below the water's surface back in 1979... why can't we stop one that's less than half that distance below the water?

 This is the Ixtoc I. It's the oil platform I was referring to with that question. If you recall, the Ixtoc I was used by a Mexico-based company called Pemex back in the 1970s. In June 1979 it exploded and finally sank, eventually dumping more than 71,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico from a depth of 11,800 feet below the seafloor. 162 miles of beaches in the United States gulf coast were impacted.

 That is the Deepwater Horizon surrounded by a sheen of oil. This is about 50 miles or so off of Louisiana's coast. Oil has already far outstretched their beaches and reached up into their marshes and inland waterways, horribly damaging their ecosystems. Currently all the media outlets are concentrating on the deep-water drilling ban that's actually hurting the state's already reeling economy, as well as the rehabilitation of animals who've gotten into the oil.

Personally, I'm more concerned with stopping the well from gushing hundreds-of-thousands of gallons of oil per day. Currently, BP has put a cap on the well and is pumping a good bit of the crude to the surface. But it's not catching everything.

The latest word is that they're actually going to try what Pemex did with the Ixtoc spill - drill a pair of relief wells. It won't be something that takes immediate effect, but anyone who thought this should be something that only took a matter of days is seriously naive. As I pointed out in my earlier post, this isn't the first oil spill the U.S. has gone through. It's not the first oil spill to rock the world. We will recover from this environmental disaster just like we recovered from the others.

Meanwhile, BP CEO Tony Hayword is no longer the frontman for the spill. Serves him right, the insensitive jerk. Congress ripped him a new one last week after he told them he wasn't "up to speed" on all of the company's proceedings. How does that work exactly? And he certainly didn't win any friends when he spouted this off on national television: No one wants this to be over with more than me. You know, I'd like my life back.

Really? He'd like his life back? He's only ruined the livelihoods of thousands of people. And what about the 11 workers who were killed in the explosion? I bet they'd love to have their lives back. I bet they'd love to be able to take their yatchs and enter them in races in non-oil-poluted waters.

Good riddance.