Deep Thought
Why do the people on my teevee keep calling the Gulf Coast Oil Chernobyl a “spill”?
“Spill” isn’t the right word at all: it’s not even a case of minimizing the disaster, like calling a sucking a chest wound a paper cut, although that is also true.
An “oil spill” at least as most people define it is when a container, like a tanker, crashes and the oil spills out. It’s always awful when this happens, but there’s a (relatively) finite amount of oil that will spill from a ship.
What’s going on in the Gulf is an underwater version of an old-fashioned “eureka-we-struck-oil” gusher. Or like blowing a massive hole in the Grand Hoover Dam.
A spill is what happens when the oil has already been removed from the well, and is in a tanker. What’s going on in the Gulf of Mexico is something very very different, and far more disastrous.
