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People say we weren’t prepared for this oil spill, but that’s really not a fair statement in any respect. Just as soon as we heard about it, we hopped in a BP pickup and drove over to the Home Depot and started looking for some of that flexible black tubing to stick in the well.

We flagged down one of the fellas there, and he showed us the biggest diameter they had, and we said, “We’re going to need about a mile of it, and maybe a little extra just in case something goes wrong.”

But he said they didn’t keep a mile of it in stock. We said, “You sure about that?” but he didn’t even go look out in the yard or on the computer or anything. So I’m not pointing any fingers, but that could have made a big difference right there.

So then we had to drive several miles over to Lowe’s, and they had quite a bit of the tubing. But then they didn’t have any real big clamps.

Dale said to me, “If we can’t find some kind of hose clamps, maybe a bunch of those zip ties.” I thought that sounded pretty good, and we looked around for those for a while.

By now it was getting toward lunch time, so we stopped at a place, and while we were standing in line, some guy saw our company patches and asked about the problem. We told him we had already made considerable progress.

“How you gonna work on it, clear down in the water like that?” he wanted to know, and we just kind of laughed at him.

But while we were eating at the table there, Dale said, “How are we gonna do that?” We puzzled over that for a while, but we decided that the robotic submersibles could probably do whatever needed doing.

But we weren’t sure if the subs had all the right attachments we might need, so we drove back to the store and picked up a couple of big Vise-Grips and a bundle of hacksaw blades. At the last minute, Dale grabbed some of that good two-part epoxy. He’s always thinking ahead.

When we got to work, some of the other fellas had been sketching out some ideas on their own, and they wanted to build a great big box and lower it down over the well.

We couldn’t see anything wrong with that, so we headed back to the store and got some treated 2-by-4s and marine-grade plywood, and went with the stainless steel screws. We figured we’d better do it up right and argue with the bosses later when they saw the bill.

But that project didn’t work the way we had hoped. Some things you just can’t know until the time comes.

Somebody said there was a way to suck oil off the surface like a big old vacuum cleaner, but nobody seemed to know where you would get the equipment for a thing like that. I placed a couple of phone calls to Norway, because they seem to solve a lot of ocean problems over there, but the guys I talked to were sort of useless. It’s hard to find the right person in a good-sized country.

So then somebody wondered whether we should just fill the pipe with drilling mud, so we gave that a whirl. She almost worked, but not quite.

Then, of course, it took a couple of tries to cut off the pipe, but that’s to be expected. Every time I do a project at home, I end up getting a different tool about 10 times, and that’s without the whole world looking over my shoulder.

Right now, we’re talking about hurricane season and hoping we don’t get a second situation going, because that’s all we need.

But if something does happen, at least we’re even better prepared because of all we learned this time, even though I assure you we were completely prepared before we ever started turning the drill.

For one thing, we’re definitely going to write down the phone numbers of Home Depot and Lowe’s ahead of time. That will save us considerable driving right there.