It's Day 4: Who makes the call to end the test?

Caught two nice flounder in Mobile Bay yesterday, and both were promptly fileted, seasoned with fresh ground pepper and lemon juice, and grilled to summertime seafood perfection.  Sides were dirty rice and sauted zucchini from the vines that the damned squash vine borers hadn't found yet.  Awesomely awesome.

It's Day 4, and from BP's morning technical update, it looks like the cap is going to stay closed indefinitely.  After all, who wants to be the guy that says, "unplug the damned hole?"

There are probably some legal implications associated with opening the cap and letting oil flow into the Gulf of Mexico again.  BP has, for all intents and purposes, stopped the leak.  If the government commands them to restart those awful images of billowing crude, then it's probably the government's leak from that point forward, not BP's.  There may not be much of a legal argument there, but there's a damned good political and public relations one.

BP Exec speaking to media: "We had it stopped. They were the ones who said we had to open it."

Again, I wouldn't want to be the man who says, "unplug the damned hole."


BP's army of ROV's continue to monitor the wellhead, new capping stack and the seafloor.  The doom and panic crowd have been wringing their hands and worrying their followers with dire predictions of a massive eruption of hydrocarbons from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Hasn't happened, and it probably ain't gonna.

I'm looking forward to blogging about stuff other than that damned hole and the pathetic effort to plug the damned thing.  Good engineering discipline has, seemingly, finally won the day.

Today I'm taking the kids swimming in the Bay, just east of Navy Cove.


Gimme some feedback in the comments.