My analysis from the get-go was something like this; The earth is 8000 miles in diameter. The idea that drilling a 1 foot diameter hole a couple of miles into the crust could release something that would cause widespread destruction defies common sense.
Well, besides the fact that the diameter of the Earth is 25,000 miles, not 8,000, the logic of your analysis is a bit wanting.
Comparing the size of the hole to the size of the Earth is, well, irrelevent. It's what's coming out of the hole that matters.
You are a 180 lb man who owns a yellow car who is hit by a piece of lead that weighs a quarter of an ounce - what possible harm could it do? Well, how about the fact that the lead is moving at 2500 fps?
You are a 180 lb man who took a vacation to Hawaii three years ago, infected by a virus that weighs 1/billionth of an ounce - what harm could it do?
You are a 180 lb man wearing a red shirt who just walked two blocks to get an ice cream cone that had a mere 1/4 ounce of strychnine mixed into it - what harm could it do?
You are an ocean on a 25,000 mile in diameter planet infected by a 1 foot diameter hole out of which oil is pouring at 25,000 lbs pressure for months. Chemical agents - banned for their toxicity in Europe - are poured into the leaked oil which break it up and make it soluble in water, and then a hurricane is able to lift the oiled chemical water and dumps it on five states, saturating the crops with the chemical, poisoning the crops and damaging the plants.
What harm could that do? The real question is - why hasn't it done that harm, besides there being no hurricane? In other words, where did all the oil go? One clue is that the chemical makes the oil sink about 20 feet down, so it still could be out there, now unskimmable from the surface, just waiting to be broken up by a storm and dispersed across the land.
The story was obviously exaggerated by the media, but the question still stands: the oil came out - so where is it now?