They would die in so many ways.

...and just curious if anyone has been following the 'oil spill' going on in the Gulf

..and if so, and it was YOUR responsibility, how would you stop it?

But the trouble was just beginning: when drilling resumed, Williams says there was an accident on the rig that has not been reported before. He says, four weeks before the explosion, the rig's most vital piece of safety equipment was damaged.

Down near the seabed is the blowout preventer, or BOP. It's used to seal the well shut in order to test the pressure and integrity of the well, and, in case of a blowout, it's the crew's only hope. A key component is a rubber gasket at the top called an "annular," which can close tightly around the drill pipe.

Williams says, during a test, they closed the gasket. But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising to the top made a troubling find.

"He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.' And I thought, 'How can it be not a big deal? There's chunks of our seal is now missing,'" Williams told Pelley.

And, Williams says, he knew about another problem with the blowout preventer.

The BOP is operated from the surface by wires connected to two control pods; one is a back-up. Williams says one pod lost some of its function weeks before.

Transocean tells us the BOP was tested by remote control after these incidents and passed. But nearly a mile below, there was no way to know how much damage there was or whether the pod was unreliable.

In the hours before the disaster, Deepwater Horizon's work was nearly done. All that was left was to seal the well closed. The oil would be pumped out by another rig later. Williams says, that during a safety meeting, the manager for the rig owner, Transocean, was explaining how they were going to close the well when the manager from BP interrupted.

"I had the BP company man sitting directly beside me. And he literally perked up and said 'Well my process is different. And I think we're gonna do it this way.' And they kind of lined out how he thought it should go that day. So there was short of a chest-bumping kind of deal. The communication seemed to break down as to who was ultimately in charge," Williams said.

I would plug the leak by shooting Lady Gaga CDs into the well... Oh wait, most of those were digital downloads.

If that didn't work I'd shoot all those ill fated Gibson Hendrix-caster guitars into the well. They're just sitting in a factory somewhere, let's put them to use!

You hear talk of a nuclear device being used and that makes me think that the use of a MOAB our conventional 21,000 pound air burst bomb being sunk under water and just off the sea floor and detonated would work by causing a concussion to cave the drilled hole in on itself. No nuke waste from such a devise.

Ask Sarah Palin, I'm SURE she'll know what to do!

On a realistic note, I don't know which Presidential Administration allowed that well. Obviously, it was not Obama's. And maybe I'm being naive but common sense dictates there should have been some strict regulatory agency in place which should have demanded, studied and ultimately had to give final approval on a fail-safe contingency plan for something such as this prior to allowing that well to become a reality. Also, if any country does in fact, know how to effectively deal with this kind of catastrophe, I find it ludicrous that we don't enroll their help, nukes not withstanding. YMMV.

There are over 3000 such wells in the Gulf right now. Chevron are the guys that are doing the deepest drilling in the Gulf.

I sure there are a few 51LB. MK54's laying around from the Davy Crocket days. That was our smallest nuke that they outlawed in 1994.

Keep in mind I am not actually advocating the use of nukes. It is way beyond my knowledge to even guess what might happen.

I wonder how peoples thinking on this will change once the years first serious storms start brewing though.

Hey 12B they were saying that well has enough oil in it that in can continue to leak as now for over twenty years. If they can't use submersibles to place some sort of well head over the break and remotely attach and shut off then I am game for a big bang. Of course it wold have to be calculated were to place a charge and at what depth. You don't want to blowing the top off of something opening it deeper down. The well is 5000 ft down and I am guessing the well is another 10,000 plus bellow the floor so cave in the first 1000 ft of sentiment and soil would that be enough to stop the pressure? That would be a question.

that's the question, is the formation down there going to collapse, and cap, or could it just rip wide open.

Glad us dumbass git players aren't responsible for figuring it out.
I've worked on landbound rigs, but never anything offshore, either way i think the economy in my area will benefit from this, your country buys a lot of Alberta oil. there's no way this doesn't affect your country's production, so either you buy more from us, or you cut a deal with some of the world's tyrants. Other energy means are decades from any real kind of viability.

I think there will have to be some kind of extreme action taken, unless they are lucky enough to get calm weather until August.