At up to 30 gallons per second, is it a spill, a leak, or a torrent? Of course “Oil Spill” no longer means substance fallen out, nor leak, amount escaped. It describes the mess that’s left, and the Deepwater Horizon is still being downplayed as potentially worse than the Exxon Valdez, but nowhere near the biggest, in the other Gulf, during its 1990 namesake war, the deliberate draining of a pipeline. The second largest oil “spill” occurred just down our coast in 1979, and is referenced more descriptively as the IXTOC I Blowout. As the BP/Transocean well empties into the Gulf of Mexico, wouldn’t our emergency response be better served to call this disaster a “blowout?”

Spew, gush, geyser, the imprecision of these words tend to sputter, BP’s ongoing environmental fiasco a BLOWOUT!

We have no one’s word but British Petroleum’s to trust about the rate at which their oil is polluting the sea. First they said 1,000 barrels, then 5,000, though we learn 100,000 was being discussed as not outside the realm of possibility. Outside experts had only the telltale expansion rate of the initial oil slick to derive a candid measure of the outflow. Now that the oil has reached the coast, the measure is once again up to those who command the deep water submersibles. They can tell us they’ve capped a third leak, or a fourth or fifth, they could tell us the Madonna directed them where to deposit their giant concrete dome and how would we know?

Let’s call BP’s latest spill a “blowout.” With no help forthcoming for three months if that, we might as well project this blowout’s probable record-setting impact. How large did BP concede was the capacity of this well? No need to calculate the spill when we know the size of the bucket.

We don’t down-class hurricanes just because they haven’t reached us yet, then upgrade them as we feel their effect. Minimizing the size of this disaster can only justify being less prepared.