Bad Pencraft

Strange news have been washing ashore like tar balls since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Tunku Varadarajan wrote in The Daily Beast that “The BP-engineered oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has us all in a state of national, environmental meltdown. This catastrophe, this ‘oil-ocaust,’ has oozed massively into the national consciousness like some ungovernable evil emerged from the ocean depths.” A flowery description, but neither did BP “engineer” (= to arrange by skillful, secret planning) the spill nor is it an oil-ocaust. The word Holocaust means "entirely (holo) burnt or destroyed (kaustos)." An oil-o-caust, therefore, would denote burnt (or maybe entirely burnt if the "o" stands for "holo") oil – something everybody most likely would prefer to the continuing outpour of crude oil into the Atlantic.
The Huffington Post reported that “The catastrophic explosion that caused an oil spill from a BP offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico has reached the shoreline early Friday morning.” An explosion does not ride the sea or walk the waters. The oil, however, will wash up on the shore as long as the leaking well continues to “pump more oil into the ocean indefinitely until the leak is plugged." Indefinitely or until the leak is plugged?
So far, it looks more like indefinitely since many attempts to plug the well have failed. Yet, Doug Suttles (!), BP's operating officer for exploration and production "wouldn’t say it has failed yet. What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn’t work” ("New Setback in Containing Gulf Oil Spill," NYT 5/9). The difference between failing and not working may elude everybody else, but BP has a knack for subtleties. When in October 2009, after gas at a processing plant leaked, Representative Henry A. Waxman insisted that "'this incident could have caused an explosion.' Mr. Hayward [chief of BP] acknowledged that the gas leak could have been serious but insisted 'it wasn’t an incident'" ("Fast-Growing BP Also Has a Mounting List of Spills and Safety Lapses," NYT 5/9). Well, what was it then? An accident?
In the Gulf of Mexico, the situation might even get worse with the approaching hurricane season that, according to NPR “may encumber the oil spill.” Everything that has the potential of encumbering (= making it more difficult for something to develop) the spill would be great news indeed.
Right now, it seems pretty clear that this spill will “eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history — the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 — in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor. Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells typically hold many times more oil than a single tanker” (YahooNews). It’s not rocket science to figure out that only an event that grows much larger can eclipse another, preceding one. That the Deepwater Horizon spill has the potential to do so because a well holds more oil than a single tanker is another astounding observation. Not even BP is benighted enough to invest in an off-shore drilling enterprise that won’t yield more than one tanker load.