BP's PR Campaign Is Tottering And Crashing

From the beginning of this oil spill, BP has desperately been trying to manage the PR; trying to disperse the oil away from shore (preferably keeping it emulsified underwater in locations where there are fewer fish, preferably off the Continental Shelf), trying to limit public access to the oil and the beaches, trying to control video imagery of the well itself, trying to deflect news coverage, etc. And we were complicit in BP's efforts, because we knew instinctively it was very bad news, and people shrink from that. But that lump under the immense rug of the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, and that sheen just over the horizon, is now just too big. No PR campaign can blunt this, and now there will be hell to pay!

I thought it was the end of the world in 1979, when the Ixtoc 1 oil well blew in the Gulf of Mexico's Bay of Campeche. I was wrong. This is the end of the world!:

BP's success at drawing oil from a leaking pipe has proved that official estimates of the size of the Gulf of Mexico spill have been too low.

The company effectively admitted as much Thursday when it said that a tube inserted into the broken pipe connected to its blown-out well is collecting as much as 5,000 barrels of oil and 15 million cubic feet of gas a day, even as a live video feed shows large volumes continuing to billow into gulf waters.

"There's still oil leaking there. We're not saying otherwise," BP spokesman Mark Proegler said Thursday.

After the company released a video of the gushing leak last week, independent scientists estimated the amount of oil spewing into the gulf could be 14 times as great as the 5,000-barrel-a-day figure officials have used for weeks to describe the month-old spill.