Obama visits Gulf disaster, largest U.S. spill ever

VENICE
Fri May 28, 2010 5:28am EDT
 
Louisiana (Reuters) - President Barack Obama heads to the Gulf coast on Friday to assert control over the largest oil spill in U.S. history as energy giant BP Plc battles deep on the sea floor to plug its gushing oil well.
For a few hours, Obama will visit the Louisiana coast where the gloppy oil has permeated precious wetlands, closed down a lucrative fishing trade and angered locals still on the mend from 2005's Hurricane Katrina.
BP on Friday said the cost of the disaster now was $930 million, up from a $760 million estimate on Monday. The cost is sure to multiply with clean-up of the spill, which has now surpassed the Exxon Valdez disaster off the Alaska coast in 1989.
Friday's trip will be Obama's second visit to the Gulf in the more than five weeks since a rig explosion killed 11 workers and unleashed the oil from a well head one mile down.
His tour comes just a day after he vowed to "get this fixed" as criticism swelled over what many Americans see as a slow government response to one of the country's biggest environmental catastrophes.
Even his 11-year-old daughter Malia is weighing in, asking "Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?" Obama told reporters.
Many wonder if the BP spill will turn into Obama's Hurricane Katrina, a disaster of epic proportions that overwhelmed his predecessor, George W. Bush.
The quandary for Obama, however, is that the federal government lacks the tools and technology to solve the deep-sea disaster and depends on BP to find the way to stanch the flow. Relations between the two camps have been strained as Washington put the blame squarely on the London-based company.
The latest option is the "top kill," a procedure BP launched on Wednesday that pushes heavy fluids known as drilling mud into the well to weigh down the gushing oil. Once that happens, BP will cap the well with cement.
BP also may inject a "junk shot" of shredded rubber, golf balls and other materials to add more weight.
TOP KILL TOPS AGENDA
The company said on Friday it still could not determine how successful the top kill tactic has been and that the mud pumping could continue for another 24 to 48 hours. The maneuver has never been done at such a depth and experts put the odds of success at 50 percent.
Investors, however, had bet on success on Thursday with BP shares rising 6 percent in London. But shares were down about 2 percent in Friday's trading.
If top kill fails, BP said it will immediately try other remedies, such as corralling the oil so it can be transported by pipe to a drillship at the water's surface or placing a new blowout preventer atop the failed one.
It is also drilling two relief wells that will stop the flow but those will take several weeks to complete.
The scale of the spill expanded hugely with new government figures on Thursday that put the flow rate from the ruptured well at as much as four or five times BP's estimate of 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) a day.
The U.S. Geological Survey now estimates that the flow ranges from 12,000 barrels (504,000 gallons/1.9 million liters) to 25,000 barrels (1.05 million gallons/3.97 million liters ) per day. The team's best estimate is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels per day.
In the Louisiana wetlands, scientists showed where oil washed into wild cane fields, discoloring the base of green cane and reeds and piercing the air with its pungent smell.
Many of these small islands of wetlands were surrounded by the white protective boom that has been laid out to prevent the oil from seeping in but it was clearly being breached.
"Each of these islands has been fouled," said Ian MacDoland, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University, as he surveyed the scene.
(Writing by Mary Milliken; Editing by Bill Trott)

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6430AR20100528?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Top+News%29


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