BP Announces Firm Timetable for Capping of Well

Baton Rouge, LA – At a seaside press conference, British Petroleum announced a strict timetable for finally capping the gushing well in the Gulf Coast, and expects to stop the majority of the flow within 24 hours. Maybe 48.

“We’re confident that we will have re-capped the broken pipe with a permanent fixture by tomorrow (Monday), and have a parallel well in place soon thereafter. Our engineers have been working day and night, quite often I might add, to bring this crisis to an end and it’s now on the horizon, no pun intended,” BP Managing Director Robert Dudley, who heads up the Gulf Coast Restoration Organisation, said [the destroyed oil platform was named the Deepwater Horizon].

As three designer-suited BP executives struggled with a squealing, oil bound seal pup to keep it from distracting their chief officer, Dudley continued.

“Factoring in time for corporate vacations—our officers and engineers do have families and domestic responsibilities, remember—the next 72 hours are crucial, and we believe that within 4-8 days the well will for the most part no long be gushing. So to speak. In fact, by this time next week, our efforts will bear modest but impressive fruit,” Dudley said. “Then it’s back again to the computer models.”

Asked to clarify, Dudley spoke with cheery resolve and his statement, which he called “unequivocal,” laid out the precise sequence of actions to end the tragic and infuriating oil spill, the worst in U.S. history and a PR disaster for BP, before the most active period of the region’s hurricane season.

As an almost unrecognizable majestic blue heron gasped its last sticky breaths just out of camera range, the CEO walked the press through BP’s schedule in detail.

“Our ambitious timetable sets a final capping within 96 hours, with a robotic revisit to the new cap, and a new plan for recapping within 362 hours thereafter,” Dudley said. “After it is then finally capped, the following 192 hours will be crucial, for there will still be some leaking of slightly less than 75% from the final final cap. The next juncture, 24 hours later, is crucial, with a final final final cap robotically lowered to the broken pipe to replace the final final cap, which we expect by then to be obscured by the battered remains of a dozen previous robots.”

Once satisfied that the final final final cap has done its job, “an absolutely new new cap will be designed within 36 hours to replace the final final final cap within 60 days. Possibly. Let’s say October,” Dudley added.

“That should do the trick, but we’ve never had to make these kinds of predictions a full mile beneath the ocean’s surface. Let’s be patient. One shouldn’t get one’s hopes up, should one?”