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Of people working on this cleanup project. they have a thousand people in their crisis center. so this was all part of what every oil company has as a plan to address things when they go badly wrong. >> jeff: john, what do you make -- we just had steve we' wereley on, an expert from purdue. his estimate could be as high as 70,000. bp is sat 5. a huge discrepancy there. >> what i understand, i'm not a mathematician. i respect his calculations. but i don't understand how a six-inch pipe at the base of the reservoir could allow that much liquid and gas to flow through it in 70,000 barrels is a lo...

5,000, 70,000, miles apart. >> it somewhat depends on the amount of oil versus gas that is in the mix. if you're counting crude oil that actually surfaces, you won't see the gas once it dissipates into the water. it eventually surfaces into the atmosphere. but that much crude oil, there shouldn't be that kind of discrepancy. something is missing here, and i don't know what it is. >> jeff: all right. we know it's a 21-inch pipe. that seems to be the only thing anybody can agree on. what is your best guess looking at this. when do you think this will be contained? >> well, you know, they have th...

Yeah, if you look at the video, i don't know if you can run it for -- on the show. >> jeff: it's rung. >> okay. the first six seconds of the video, there is a lot of white material coming out of the end of the pipe. and that is the gas. in fact, you can see it float upwards in the video. quite a bit more rapidly than the oil does. >> jeff: and then it turns dark. >> right. and that's the oil. toward the end of the video. i based my analysis -- yeah, go ahead. >> well, i mean, as another engineer, you trace a particle, then, and you have software that measures how fast it's going? >> exactly. t...

There, it will cut through it and shut it off. but you have to activate it. you have to turn it on to do that. it doesn't happen on its own. and so it's not -- >> jeff: so it's not like a train where if the conductor goes down, everything shuts down. >> the dead man pedal. in this case, in congressional testimony they said if the battery is dead, the dead man pedal, the dead man system doesn't work. it's not quite the same. >> jeff: steve, you're a flow measurement expert. we've been talking about it. everybody is talking about it. what is your take on how much oil is actually leaking out? >> ...

Catastrophic failure of how many systems. until we investigate what went wrong, we don't know what happened when. but it's catastrophic. i think they have an all-hands on deck response. they're going through the whole crisis exercise, listing lots of remedies. and while it looks like perhaps they're changing course, they're actually following a list, a menu of things they could possibly do to fix this leak. >>. >> jeff: one of the things i've heard talk about is this relief well. is that -- that seems like -- or sounds like it is a massive undertaking that could potentially be months in the ma...