Visualizing Data: 100,000,000 Gallons of BP Oil in Other Contexts

BP has caused 100,000,000 gallons of oil to be released into the Gulf of Mexico.

With numbers getting to be this big, it gets a little harder to visualize even the scope of the breadth of the disaster let alone its effects on the ecosystem. So:

100,000,000 gallons of oil would fill the 555'-tall Washington Monument seven times.         


100,000,000 gallons of oil would fill the Big Ben clock tower 70 times

If 100 million one gallon jugs of oil were set side-by-side in a line it would stretch across the country and back again.

If you had started to fill your car with 100,000,000 gallons of BP oil --it would've been  Amoco Oil--you would've started a little before the October 1973 gas shortage (at a rate of 5 gallons a minute).

If on a clear night the best the human eye could see is 6,000 stars, and if each star represented a gallon of oil, it would take 40 years of clear nights to represent the BP disaster.       

Hopefully it won’t take 40 years to clean this mess.

____

Incidentally, you should check out the insipid history BP has provided for itself at its website For example:

"Our history is full of discoveries, starting in 1908 with oil found in a rugged part of Persia after a long and difficult search. Since then, discoveries large and small (and sometimes just in the nick of time) have fuelled our progress."

Is this written for first graders?

"In our story, you may make a few discoveries of your own. Winston Churchill gives a rousing speech. The Smurfs cause a traffic jam. Our employees help construct a giant spool, build the world’s largest deepwater pipeline and bring solar power to remote villages in the Philippines."

It also looks like BP has misspelled "fueled" and "deep water" on their own website.  Nice attention to detail!

Comments

[Steven Taylor]

Fuelled is a common British spelling.

[John F. Ptak]

That's it? I was trying to get across what 100 million gallons BP product looks like and you point out that "fuelled" is correct to a spelling minority? BP's interest in getting something "fuelled" seems more public relations and internet search engine hijacking than much else. I can't give them the spelling.

[Angela_la_la]

Well, BP does stand for British Petroleum. It doesn't surprise me that the company would use a British spelling in their promotional material.

I don't think correcting your error detracts from the message of your post. The oil spill is completely outrageous. A large corporation having self-serving PR materials, however? Not so shocking.

[John F. Ptak]

There's just so much to chose from here with this catastrophic and (soon-to-be-shown) criminal behavior that I'm not sure where to start. (BP, which *used* to stand for British Petroleum but now is simply company's name, does have a history of pleading guilty to criminal negligence. (As a matter of fact there were complaints about calling BP "British Petroleum" with a call for cease and desist.)) Honestly, its a ghastly feat of the devils. I thought that sniffing around my rant about "fuelled" was a little off, and so I responded. The self-serving promotionals was expected, but even with expectation they looked like porn to me. The purchasing of browser placement away from news sources *was* a surprise, but then again I don't live in that world, and now I suspect that is total SOP. That doesn't make it any less Orwellian; and perhaps more so. Lastly I find the word "spill" really doesn't sit well, and is wholly lacking in communicating any sort of magnitude. Even qualifying it, "unprecedented" and "outrageous", a spill seems to me what a baby does with milk, or a dig with a water bowl, or a drunk at a bar. But "spill" seems to be all we have--seems like we need a new word for this case, though now that I write this I feel as though I'm missing good replacement candidates. Thanks for writing in, Ms. Angela.