Slideshow: Obama sees Gulf oil spill up close
SLIDESHOW - Obama arrived in the Gulf, where he stood on Fourchon Beach in his shirt-sleeves and called reporters to the water's edge to point out some small clumps of oil...
PORT FOURCHON, Louisiana (AP) — Intent on showing firm command of the deepening crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama flew to coastal Louisiana on Friday for his second in-person update on the country’s most devastating oil spill.
Meanwhile, BP kept pumping heavy mud into its blown-out well beneath the Gulf of Mexico, but the company’s chief executive cautioned it will be two more days before anyone knows if the latest fix attempt will end the uncontrolled flow of crude that has already become the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
BP CEO Tony Hayward had projected a resolution to the so-called “top kill” as soon as Thursday afternoon, but an 18-hour delay in the injection of heavyweight mud scuttled those plans. Though engineers had stopped pumping hours earlier, BP and coast Guard officials assured the public Thursday morning that the process was going as planned.
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Friday that heavyweight mud was able to push down the oil and gas coming up at great force from underground, but it has not overwhelmed the gusher or stopped the flow.
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Obama arrived in the Gulf, where he stood on Fourchon Beach in his shirt-sleeves and called reporters to the water’s edge to point out some small clumps of oil. The beach, one of the few sandy stretches along the Louisiana coast, was sealed off with crime-scene-style yellow tape.
“These are the tar balls that they’re talking about,” he said. “You can actually send out teams to pick up as they wash on shore.”
Friday’s trip was the president’s second to the coast since the BP-leased oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and triggering the spill.
He was to be briefed in Grand Isle, Louisiana, where the beach has been closed since globs of oil started washing up a week ago. Obama was being joined there by the governors of Louisiana, Florida and Alabama. He was spending about three hours in the region.
Criticism of Obama is rising as crude continues to gush out of the leak 39 days after the oil rig exploded and sank. Amid fears the tragedy crippling the Gulf region’s wildlife and economy could soon also engulf his presidency, Obama has launched a campaign to step up public engagement and directly confront the public’s anger.
A day earlier, he held a rare White House news conference to address the matter, saying “I take responsibility” for handling what is now considered the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.
The top kill is oil and gas giant BP PLC’s latest untested bid to end the spill that has, by the most conservative estimate, surpassed the Exxon Valdez disaster by gushing more than 18 million gallons into the Gulf. It has worked on land but never been tried 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) underwater, and Hayward gave it a 60 to 70 percent chance of success.
He said Friday morning the top kill was progressing as planned and BP engineers had completed a second phase by pumping what he called “loss prevention material” into a crippled piece of equipment known as a blowout preventer to form a bridge against which crews could pump more heavyweight mud.
“Clearly I’m as anxious as everyone in America is to get this thing done,” Hayward said.
If the top kill fails, BP’s next best hope for controlling even part of the leak is a tinier version of something that has already been tried: a steel containment box to cap the well. A 100-ton box lies junked on the ocean floor, abandoned by BP after ice-like crystals clogged it.
While BP officials say the smaller box shouldn’t have that problem, it’s clearly not their preferred method. It has been sitting in reserve on the seabed for more than a week while engineers first tried to siphon off oil through a mile-long tube.
That succeeded in collecting 924,000 gallons (3.5 million liters) before crews took it out to allow room for the top kill attempt.
If the small box doesn’t work, BP officials say they will go back to the tube, crossing their fingers that a relief well still weeks away from being drilled far enough to affect the leak will help stop the bleeding.
And even that’s not a sure bet. Obama said Thursday that authorities insisted BP drill a second relief well as a backup since such wells often miss their mark.
BP said in a regulatory filing Friday that it has spent $930 million so far responding to the ruptured well, including costs for cleanup and prevention work, drilling relief wells, and paying grants to Gulf states, damage claims and federal costs. BP says it’s too early to quantify other potential costs and liabilities associated.
Two teams of scientists calculated the well has been spewing between 504,000 (1.9 million liters) and more than a million gallons (about 4 million liters) a day, which in the worst-case scenario means about 39 million gallons (147.6 million liters) could have leaked.
The larger figure would be nearly four times the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster, in which a tanker ran aground in Alaska in 1989, spilling nearly 11 million gallons.
The new Gulf spill estimates released Thursday were far higher than the 210,000 gallons (794,913 liters) that BP and the Coast Guard had guessed was pouring from the well.
But even the highest estimate would not make the spill the biggest ever in the Gulf. In 1979, a drilling rig in Mexican waters — the Ixtoc I — blew up, releasing 140 million gallons (530 million liters) of oil.
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Associated Press writers Ben Nuckols, Greg Bluestein, Matthew Brown, Jason Dearen, Andrew Taylor, Matthew Daly, Mary Foster and Kevin McGill along Louisiana’s coast contributed to this report.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.
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