A barrel of oil every 4.5 seconds

The government & BP just upped their estimate of the spill-- from 5,000 barrels of oil a day. Now they say between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels of oil are escaping each day. In the worst-case, that's 13.194 barrels per minute, or a barrel of oil every four and a half seconds.

A barrel of oil is 42 gallons. So that's 554 gallons of oil every minute, or a little over 9 gallons per second. And to think they hope to use good old-fashioned mud (their "top-kill" strategy) to clog a leak that looks like a fire hose even a mile below sea-level, where the sea-pressure is 2,000 pounds per square inch. Some have speculated that the leak must be gushing at around 4,000 pounds per square inch to overcome that kind of downward pressure.

In more earthly terms, that's roughly enough pressure that if the oil was spewing from a manhole cover or fire hose, the force could overturn a 70-ton bulldozer.