Back to work for Gulf oil spill containment efforts
7/27/2010
The oil-belching beast at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico could be dead in as soon as two weeks.
By Monday, BP plans to start a ``static kill'' that will force mud and cement down the well's throat. Five to seven days later, if the timeline holds, a drilling rig would deliver the coup de grace in a relief well deep beneath the sea floor -- piercing the bore hole into a void called the annulus, then the inner casing, and finally entombing the gusher under still more mud and cement.
``By the end of the week after next, we have the potential to enter the annulus and begin killing the well,'' Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said Monday, laying out the end game for an epic environmental catastrophe that cost communities billions of dollars and will apparently get the oil giant's bumbling boss booted to Russia.
The BBC, Associated Press and other media reported Monday that gaffe-prone chief executive Tony Hayward would step down in October. But, reports said, he also will be offered a job with a BP joint venture in Russia -- and, according to the BBC, a $930,000 annual pension likely to anger thousands of the Gulf Coast who have lost jobs as a result of the spill.
Overall on Monday, the massive effort to cleanup after the nation's worst offshore oil spill continued to progress.
The temporary cap remained in place for an 11th day with no signs of oil or gas leaks from the seafloor, Allen said.
While work to prepare for the twin ``killings'' continued, cleanup crews also were back out in force to assess conditions after Tropical Depression Bonnie -- but finding less and less oil to target.
Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, who is directing the cleanup operations, said he spent six hours flying over the spill zone but spotted only one large blob about 12 miles off Grand Isle, La. He said there were no reports of oil in Lake Pontchartrain, Chandeleur Sound or, more critically, coastal marshes that make up one of the country's richest estuaries.
Zukunft said Bonnie, which fizzled as it crossed the Gulf, left 32 miles of boom stranded in marshes after they were dislodged by strong waves, but the storm was too weak to generate a large surge that scientists had worried could have pushed oil into wetlands.
Even though the surface slick had greatly dissipated, Allen and Zukunft both stressed that the cleanup is far from over.
There is still a lot of oil in the Gulf, just spread into ``hundreds of thousands'' of small patches, Allen said, and it remained unclear how much oil remained hidden below the surface.
Once remnant slicks are skimmed up, crews will shift to tar-ball patrol and continue monitoring the shorelines for oil -- work that could continue for a month or more after the well is capped.
Though it appeared the tide has turned in the cleanup, after months of previous failures, Allen also added a caution.
``We're not going to declare any victory until that well is killed.''
Source: The Miami Herald