Maniacs on pedestals

Mr. Wells said he could not yet say how much oil had been captured or what percentage of the oil leaking from a 21-inch riser pipe was now flowing into the 4-inch-wide insertion tube. “We want to slowly optimize it to try to capture as much of the oil and gas as we can without taking in a large amount of seawater,” he said.

“This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”

As Utah Phillips said, these people have addresses.