No, I'm not involved in the spill in any way. I'm not doing a damn thing to help clean it up besides watching and waiting and not being able to watch the news.
I was just a passenger on a jet that flew from Dallas to Miami, and we happened to go over the top of the disaster.
I saw it from 30,000 feet.
From that height, I didn't think we'd see much. Oh. God. Was I wrong.
At the site, you could see a whole bunch of little bitty ships, and a massive stain in the water.
From that altitude the oil was not black like the satellite photos, or reddish as seen in the aerials from lower heights ... it was a weird darker shade of green, and even from that incredible height it had that familiar oily rainbow shimmer appearance that set it apart from the occasional columns of untainted water.
The worst part, folks, is that our jet, traveling at about 575 miles an hour, flew on for SEVENTEEN MINUTES before I saw the other edge of the stain.
I'm no good at math but I expect that means the oil I saw, the main slick, went on for 170 miles beyond the origin point.
When I see these wellmeaning good ol boys on tv with their bundles of hay, or their new chemical solutions, or their oil-eating microbes, I am now forced to realize that the spill is so very very much larger than we have realized. It's larger than we can comprehend. It's too big now. It can't possibly be "made right," as Tony Hayward claims they'll do.