4 ms·

Anyone know why this wasn't tried earlier? Lower estimated chance of success than other previous strategies? Would have precluded other options if it failed?

• dasht 16y ago
  I'm not an expert. I'm just passing along what I hear Prof. Bea of UC Berkeley saying (and that makes intuitive sense to me). One of the big risks of the top-kill procedure is a kind of "you push in here, it pops out there" problem. There's a big pipe down into the ground, right? It's constructed in segments. We have limited amounts of information about what condition it's in. There is risk that they throw mud down, that does indeed slow or stop the current flows, but the flows find a new path busting through the pipes or the joints between segments - and the net result is a flow just as bad or worse as before the top kill but even harder to fix. That they've only so far "slowed" the flow doesn't give me much encouragement yet. Both plots ("it works" and "it fails and makes things worse") start that way.