This sounds like a joke, but it isn’t:

What’s 10 stories high, a football field wide, almost 4 football fields long, cruises the oceans, and can suck in 21 million gallons of seawater a day?

The answer: A Whale.

No, not the mammal, but a Taiwanese-flagged vessel called “A Whale” which is the latest in the series of project “workarounds” for the Gulf /Deepwater Horizon/BP oil disaster.

“In many ways, the ship collects water like an actual whale and pumps internally like a human heart,” Bob Grantham, a spokesman for TMT Shipping, told the Associated Press news agency.

This story from BBC has a nice video with some of the details.

From a project management perspective, this continues to illustrate the magnitude of the workarounds – actually we could say families of workarounds that BP has used to deal with the triggered risk of the Deepwater Horizon.

We know about the planned risk responses (for example, the blowout preventer) and the series of other risk responses (top hat, junk shot), and the long -term workaround (the relief well), and the Ocean Therapy boats, but this one is a BIG one.  Testing is taking place as this blog post is being written.

It will be interesting – and important – to see whether this will work, although this, like most of the responses are going after the impact of the threat (the spilled oil), not the probability of the spill in the first place (as a relief well would).

Given the magnitude of this disaster – it’s not surprising to see gigantic workarounds like this!

UPDATE: for those who would like an excellent animated ‘history’ of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, click HERE to see a 22-slide slideshow which is a very well-produced summary of how it happened and what actions have been taken to date.