Well cap captures more oil, but outlook's gloomy
ON BARATARIA BAY, LA
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man for the
crisis, said the breakup has complicated the cleanup.
"Dealing with the oil spill on the surface is going to go on
for a couple of months," he said at a briefing in Washington. But
"long-term issues of restoring the environment and the habitats
and stuff will be years."
Allen said the containment cap that was installed late last week
is now collecting about 460,000 gallons of oil a day out of the
approximately 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons believed to be spewing
from the well a mile underwater.
The amount of oil captured is being slowly ramped up as more
vents on the cap are closed. Crews are moving carefully to avoid a
dangerous pressure buildup and to prevent the formation of the icy
crystals that thwarted a previous effort to contain the leak. The
captured oil is being pumped to a ship on the surface.
"I think it's going fairly well," Allen said.
BP said it plans to replace the cap -- perhaps later this month
or early next month -- with a slightly bigger one that will provide
a tighter fit and thus collect more oil. It will also be designed
to allow the company to suspend the cleanup and then resume it
quickly if a hurricane threatens the Gulf later this season. The
new cap is still being designed.
"It gives us much better containment than we've got" with the
existing cap, said BP senior vice president Kent Wells.
BP and government officials acknowledged it is difficult to say
exactly how much oil is spewing from the well, and thus how much is
still flowing into the water. BP spokesman Robert Wine said the
figures being discussed are estimates, some of which have been
provided by the government.
Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor of
environmental sciences, suggested it is too early for anyone to
claim victory. The spill, estimated at anywhere from 23 million
gallons to 50 million, is already the biggest in U.S. history,
dwarfing the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.
"We're hopeful the thing is going to work, but hoping and
actually working are two different things," Overton said. "They
may have turned the corner, they may not have. We just don't know
right now."
He said he doesn't believe BP will have turned the corner until
it sees a significant flow from the well stopped. "And it is not
entirely obvious to me that that is happening," Overton said.
"I do worry we are not removing as much oil as we ought to be
getting," he added.
The "spillcam" video of the leak continued to show a big brown
billowing cloud of oil and gas 5,000 feet below the surface.
In Washington, President Barack Obama sought to reassure
Americans that "we will get through this crisis."
"This will be contained," he said. "It may take some time,
and it's going to take a whole lot of effort. There is going to be
damage done to the Gulf Coast, and there is going to be economic
damages that we've got to make sure BP is responsible for and
compensates people for."
But in a forecast that was by turns hopeful and gloomy, Allen
indicated that cleaning up the mess could prove to be more complex
than previously thought.
"Because what's happened over the last several weeks, this
spill has disaggregated itself," Allen said. "We're no longer
dealing with a large, monolithic spill. We're dealing with an
aggregation of hundreds or thousands of patches of oil that are
going a lot of different directions."
When finished, the new cap would be connected a riser pipe
floating about 300 feet below the surface. Engineers say the riser
would be deep enough to avoid damage from hurricanes that can roar
over the Gulf of the Mexico, but shallow enough to allow returning
drill ships to quickly reconnect to the flow.
Meanwhile, crews worked furiously to skim, scour and chemically
disperse the substance from the water.
Tony Wood, the director of the National Spill Control School at
Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, said BP's success at
containing some of the leaking oil would not dramatically reduce
the amount of time it would take to clean up the Gulf.
"We have a large volume still escaping," he said. "Cleanup
levels up to twice as large as we have right now will go on for at
least a year." He added: "The reality is that most of the spill,
the vast majority of the spill, is still well offshore."
The oil -- brick red in places, chocolate brown in others -- has
washed up on the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the
Florida Panhandle.
At Barataria Bay, La., just west of the mouth of the Mississippi
River, large patches of oil the consistency of pancake batter
floated in the still waters. A dead sea turtle caked in
brownish-red oil lay splayed out with dragonflies buzzing by.
The Barataria estuary, which has become one of the hardest-hit
areas, was busy with shrimp boats skimming up oil and officials in
boats and helicopters patrolling the islands and bays to assess the
state of wildlife and the movement of oil. On remote islands,
pelicans, gulls, terns and herons were stained with oil.
Jody Haas, a tourist from Aurora, Ill., was among the few
walking on tar-stained Pensacola Beach. Haas, who has visited the
beach before, said it wasn't the same.
"It was pristine, gorgeous, white sand," she said. "This spot
is light compared to some of the other spots farther down and it is
just everywhere here. It's just devastating, awful."