The Heroes of The Gulf Oil Spill Six Years Later

    VIRGINIA BEACH, VA, July 12, 2016 /24-7PressRelease/ -- On this anniversary of the capping of the Gulf Oil Spill, we wanted to remember a few of the heroes of the event.

Kevin Costner and Garrett Sayre both naval intelligence officers--one in the movies and the other in real life--were intimately involved in the cleanup process. Costner did his best to provide oil cleanup operations via his oil and water separators, the largest of which, the V20, can clean oil-polluted water at a rate of 200 gallons a minute.

Garrett Sayre, former top-secret naval intelligence officer, is the man who came up with the oil plug design that ultimately capped the leak.

Unfortunately, despite Costner's company's best efforts to get the oil separators out to the Gulf on time, the few weeks it took to complete construction and transport the devices on site resulted in little actual effect. However, the technology is now readily available and ready to be used in the future. "This is the key," Costner told CNN. "It's certainly a way to fight oil spills in the 21st century."

We also need to give credit to the heroic efforts of the many hundreds of volunteers that came out to rescue the animals so drastically affected by the gulf oil spill. Their efforts were exceptional and saved many hundreds of birds and other animals from a horrific fate. The process of saving the birds was tedious work that involved meticulously cleaning off the oil, layer by layer, from the suffering animals. These people were truly heroic and selfless in their efforts. A lot of the rescue operations were orchestrated through The Humane Society of the United States.

The next topic of our anniversary review is Garrett Sayre, the man who came up with the oil plug design that ultimately capped the leak. Below are the details of his story.

After the cataclysmic explosion that caused 70,000 to 90,000 barrels of oil a day to flow into the surrounding environment, BP was unable to devise an effective device to stop it--trying such desperate measures as attempting to fill the broken pipe with mud and placing metal caps over the jagged, uneven edges of the broken pipe. Then, on June 10, 2010, Garrett Sayre, a former U.S. naval intelligence officer, sent a confidentially communicated capping design that described the needed device to successfully cap the BP Gulf oil leak to Admiral Thad Allen (Link for copy of email: https://app.box.com/s/jhjng947e9i08j5z42a24oroj3sacoo3). This same design was then used to successfully cap the BP Gulf oil spill on July 11, 2010; a spill which was costing British Petroleum (BP) a reported one billion dollars a month in failed attempts to contain the leak--and which was causing massive ecological damage to the entire surrounding environment for over two months-effecting over 4,000 miles of coastline.

TIMELINE OF THE SUCCESSFUL CAPPING OF THE GULF OIL LEAK

6/10/10: Admiral Thad Allen (the Federal Incident Coordinator for Deep Water Horizons Gulf oil spill) is sent an email by Sayre with all the design details for the "Rubber Capping Device" directly to his personal email (URL cited in article above).

7/10/10: The old, failed BP capping device is removed.

7/11/10: The "Rubber Capping Device" described in detail by Sayre in the letter to Admiral Thad Allen is lowered into place (See video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETctfVmq_8s or download image at: https://app.box.com/s/qd6ow3uvptrnglcwv2ecv396tqdj8u4o). However, no press information regarding the capping by the rubber capping device on 7/11/10 was released to the media - only the 24-hour camera on the site captured the event.

7/12/10: After the successful capping of the oil leak on July 11th, a second device (a control valve) is lowered over the "Rubbing Capping Device" and the image is distributed to the media with a press release from BP, which ignores the successful capping of the leak with the rubber capping device the day before.

Therefore, in the final analysis, former naval intelligence officer Garrett Stewart Sayre, who worked extensively in developing top-secret anti-terrorist strategies for the Joint Chief of Staff during his tour of duty, was the one responsible for providing Admiral Thad Allen with the design that successfully capped the leak.

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