Leak Finally Plugged but Obama Faces His Own Gulf Crisis

Washington (News Today) - Engineers have stopped the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico from a gushing BP well, the federal government’s top oil spill commander, US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, says.

The "top kill" effort, launched the day before by industry and government engineers, had pumped enough drilling fluid to block all oil and gas from the well, Admiral Allen said. The pressure from the well was very low, but persisted, he said.

Barack Obama has been under political pressure over the disaster with influential Democrats, together with exasperated coastal officials, demanding that Washington take charge of efforts to stop the leak as well as the multibillion-dollar clean-up.

As the oil that gushed freely for 37 days, Louisiana officials pleaded with the administration to intensify its involvement.

"This is an embarrassment to our country," said Bill Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, the municipality south-west of New Orleans that is home to one of America’s biggest fishing communities and which is taking the brunt of the spill.

Choking with emotion, he accused the Coast Guard and the well operator, BP, of failing to protect Louisiana’s world-significant coastal marshlands.

Thick oily residue up to a metre deep has inundated the area within more than 120 kilometres of spoilt coastline, and continues to penetrate saturated booms.

"We will lose more coastline from this catastrophe than from all four hurricanes – Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike," Mr Nungesser said.

A Democrat senator, Bill Nelson, whose home state of Florida could yet be hit by the slick, said if BP’s latest attempt to plug the leak failed, Mr Obama would need to seize personal control of the effort immediately.

A Louisiana resident, James Carville, appealed to the President. ‘‘Man, you got to get down here and take control of this, put someone in charge of this thing and get this thing moving. We’re about to die down here."

The White House insists the administration has been doing all it can, having dispatched more than 20,000 personnel to help with containment, while drafting 1300 vessels to assist with dredging and skimming.

Mr Obama, who will visit the Gulf for a second time today, has made great play in demanding that BP put things right and compensate all those hit by the spill, while foreshadowing tough new drilling regulations.

But some political strategists believe that the Deepwater Horizon blowout looms as Mr Obama’s "Katrina", a reference to how an inadequate response to the 2005 hurricane tainted the administration of George Bush.

The administration backed the so-called "top kill’’ procedure in which underwater robots have been forcing a mix of drilling mud and cement deep into the well, more than 1.6 kilometres below the surface. Several hours after the effort began on Wednesday afternoon, BP officials said the signs were hopeful.

After reviewing an Interior Department report into the spill, Mr Obama outlined four steps to prevent such an accident from happening again including suspending 33 deepwater exploratory wells being drilled in the Gulf.

"If nothing else, this disaster should serve as a wake-up call," the US president said.

The government was extending an existing moratorium on deepwater drilling as well as suspending the issuing of new permits for six months, Mr Obama said, as expert data said the oil was gushing at up to four times previous estimates.

Planned exploration in two locations off the coast of Alaska was suspended, and "we will cancel the pending lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico and the proposed lease sale off the coast of Virginia".

And Mr Obama added "we will suspend action on 33 deepwater exploratory wells currently being drilled in the Gulf of Mexico".

"The United States government has always been in charge of making sure that the response is appropriate," Mr Obama said.

"This notion that somehow the federal government is sitting on the sidelines and for the last three or four or five weeks we’ve just been letting BP make a whole bunch of decisions is simply not true," he said.

BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, said: "What you've been observing coming out of the top of that riser is most likely mud.

"The way we know we've been successful is it stops flowing."

Documents have revealed that the volume of leaking oil was likely to have been far greater than the company’s public estimate of 5000 barrels a day.

BP’s own documents put an upper estimate of more than 14,000 barrels a day.

Source : kompas.com

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