Keith Olbermann on MSNBC Monday night: "TransOcean also knew darn well that blowout preventers had a failure rate of 45% in deep, offshore drilling facilities. BP/BS has plans to drill in the Arctic in the fall, and no one's stopped it yet?!"

TransOcean did know about the shear-and-seal weaknesses of BOPs in the event of a catastrophic well blowout. And BP knew and ExxonMobil knew and Shell knew and everyone in the know knew because the Minerals Management Service, an agency of the U.S. government, did the study years before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, killed 11 people, sank and unleashed an undersea volcano of crude oil to torment the Gulf of Mexico. Alaska Dispatch reported all of that and more weeks ago.

Good that the national media is finally catching up. Bad that they don't understand the seasons of the Arctic or BP's plan for drilling there, about which the company has made no secret. BP has, in fact, run regular advertisements on Alaska television, since last year at least, touting its plan for directional drilling beneath an island on the North Slope. BP calls the project "Liberty."

Drilling is planned for winter when everything is frozen so that if oil is spilled it stays on top of water turned solid, but if you're living in that America Alaskans call "Outside," the idea of ice in October is probably as foreign as the idea of dust on the moon. Certainly the nice young man from Rolling Stone magazine who was Olbermann's guest for a night of wild, oil-fueled speculation didn't seem to get it. He was worried about oil getting off BPs island and into the water like in the Gulf, God forbid.

He wrote a story that seriously hyped the Liberty dangers:

First, the company will drill two miles beneath its tiny island ... then, in an ingenious twist, it will drill sideways for another six to eight miles, until it reaches an offshore reservoir....This would be the longest ‘extended reach' ever attempted, and the effort has required BP to push drilling technology beyond its proven limits.... BP ... calls the project ‘one of its biggest challenges to date' ... in what the company itself admits is ‘some of the harshest weather on Earth.

The facts there are generally right, the spin horribly wrong. The "harshest weather on Earth (possibly not counting the undersea environment)" is, in this case, an assist. First, BP's "tiny island" forms that containment area around the Liberty drill site where any spilled oil would be trapped. Second in October and November and on through April, there is lots of ice -- miles and miles and miles of ice around the island. Some whales got trapped in some of this ice not all that far away in October 1988. You could drive a truck from Barrow out to their tiny breathing hole to see them. A movie is now being made about them because their plight became an international affair.

Why? Because people felt sorry for the poor whales trapped there with nothing around for miles and miles and miles but all that ice. This is the way the Arctic is in the winter, which comes early.

There might be no better place on the globe for an oil spill to take place, Heaven forbid one happens, than the Arctic in winter. Oil on the ice of the North Slope or the frozen ground of the North Slope is even easier to clean up than oil on the sands of Saudi Arabia or Oklahoma, both of which have soaked up a lot of oil. And though Olbermann and his guest went on about marine BOPs, and how ship-borne ones fail even more often than those on the seabed, they apparently didn't understand that the BOP in use by BP on its Liberty Project is not a marine BOP. It is a BOP used for onshore drilling. It is of the sort proven in onshore use everywhere for a long time now.

So, to summarize, there is no underwater BOP involved here. And if the well were to blow out -- something no one anticipates because there are no indications the reservoir into which BP is drilling this time has anything near the pressure of the reservoir it tapped in the Gulf of Mexico -- most of the oil would be caught in the containment area surrounding the 31-acre island on which the Liberty rig sits.