When I first heard about the difficulties of stopping the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I thought,
“Seriously? There’s no plan here? You never tested disaster
scenarios?” It’s as if they thought it could never happen. If
there’s an emergency, you have a plan. My office has a plan for
fire drills, for example. Well, they never ran a fire drill. And
it seems that one of the factors that makes stopping this leak
so difficult is the sheer depth of the spill at 5,000 feet below
sea level. As the Christian Science Monitor reports, “BP has
once again acknowledged that this process has never been
attempted at this depth before.” New technologies have allowed
us to drill deeper and deeper wells, but the disaster prevention
technologies have not kept up at the same pace (no surprise
there). On to the maps: I was shocked when I saw this map
displaying the number of oil rigs that currently dot the Gulf of
Mexico. Searching around a bit, I was able to find the data used
to create this map at a Mineral