Read What I See

If you are still wondering if the deep drilling incident in the Gulf of Mexico was an accident, an ominous deliberate man created disaster or perhaps an unfortunate series of events and miscalculations you will love this.

We talk about the oil leak and just see it as the "Leaking Well?, "The BP well", "The Deep Drilling Horizon Well" but its real name is "The Macondo Well".  Naming it as such or arriving at that decision could seem harmless and irrelevant.  The vast majority of the world citizens are not likely to have heard that word used before.  The word sounds like it could derive from and African language or Spanish but being fully fluent in Spanish it was not familiar and had never heard of it before.  So, we could only wonder why such name was given to this gushing deep well at the bottom of the ocean long before it became a major catastrophic disaster.  Very unlikely it came as the result of a few people sitting around a table and someone just came up with a made up name.  It is unlikely that all of these highly paid individuals unanimously agreed without someone giving it some thought because that is the way it is in business.  Companies like Ford Motors and GM do extensive study before naming their models.  One good example for doing such research was when GM in the 1970's named one of their Chevy models "Nova" which translated in Spanish mean "No Go".  So obviously, every time that one of them broke down it became a joke and an issue of bad PR for GM.

Many times when we name things such as Streets, Boats, Nations or even our own Children we rely on association.  Previous events, mishaps, circumstances and a number of things usually influence the naming of things or events.  A good example of this was Martin Luther King civil rights work and his assassination.  We could comfortably say that as a result every major city in the U.S. has at least one street that has been name after him.

So the question still remains, why was this drilling experiment at 5,000 feet under the ocean floor named "Macondo"?  Well, strangely enough, Colombian writer Manuel Garcia Marquez wrote a novel in 1967 called "One Hundred Years of Solitude". The main character founded a town which became riddled with misfortunes and eventually destroyed; that town he named "Macondo".  What a coincidence!

Burning gas erupting from the Macondo well destroys the drilling platform. This much gas is still sipping from the ocean floor although, now is not burning but mixing with the water.