How much are 35,000-60,000 barrels of oil?
I have a hard time visualizing what those numbers up there really mean. I know a barrel equals 42 US gallons and I also know that this roughly equals 159 liters. The official estimates are in the range of 35,000-60,000 barrels dumping into the Gulf every day. And that’s where the numbers just get too big for me.
I looked up the standard dimensions of a real metal barrel. You can see a British barrel here (it has three more gallons, but I ignore that at the moment): 50cm wide, 50cm deep and 90cm high. So let’s take a day’s worth of barrels and line them up next to each other. You end up with a line of barrels that is between 17.5 km and 30 km (10.9 miles – 18.5 miles).
If you started at midnight and placed your first barrel on the Plaza, then continued placing barrels along the shortest route to the Santa Fe ski area during the day, you would place your last barrel for the day close to the ski area’s parking lot. For the high estimate, you would almost make it back down the mountain again. And you would have done that every single day since April 20.
Now let’s take a look at how much has spilled in total into the Gulf since April 20. Start lining up barrels again at the Plaza in Santa Fe, go down to Albuquerque, go West on I-40, cross the entire state of Arizona, head into CA and then head up north to San Francisco. For the whole drive of about 1000 miles you would see barrels lined up on one side of the road.
Now those numbers above make more sense to me …
