Tag: Weekend News Digest

In his weekly radio address, broadcast from Grand Isle, Louisiana, a community bearing the brunt of the spill, Obama pledged ongoing attention to the disaster.

“So we will continue to leverage every resource at our disposal to protect coastlines, to clean up the oil, to hold BP and other companies accountable for damages,” he said.

Hours after the British oil giant acknowledged failure in its “top kill” attempt to plug the underwater well, company officials said it could take a week to implement the next bid — placing a cap over the leak.

“Right now we are going to a containment operation,” BP Managing Director Bob Dudley told CNN’s “State of the Union” program of the latest attempt to deal with the ruptured well nearly a mile (1,600 meters) under water.

A day after President Barack Obama visited the region for the second time since the oil spill began in April, energy giant BP could offer little but assurances that the bid was ongoing, but that it was too early to judge its success.

“It’s not a nice little black and white operation and they’ve got to take it as it comes,” said Robert Wine, a spokesman for the British firm.

Initially scheduled to begin on Sunday, BP’s latest attempt to plug a leak in a ruptured pipe 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below the surface, the “top kill”, is not expected to get under way until Tuesday at the earliest.

As crews used robotic submarines to position equipment to inject heavy drilling fluids into the well and then seal it with cement, the amount of oil being suctioned up by a mile-long insertion tube slowed to 1,360 barrels a day from the previous average of about 2,100.

With the federal government facing accusations of lax supervision of the lucrative offshore oil drilling industry, Obama vowed to hold Washington accountable and warned that the future of the industry hinges on assurances such a disaster would not happen again.

He also sharpened his tone against the three firms involved in the spill — BP, Transocean and Halliburton.

A statement on the latest efforts to control the massive slick off Louisiana and stave off an environmental disaster said a tube had been inserted into the leaking pipe overnight and captured “some amounts of oil and gas.”

The process, which saw oil sucked up as if through a straw to a giant drill ship on the surface, comes after US President Barack Obama blasted the companies involved for seeking to shift blame and shirk responsibility.

The latest effort by British Petroleum to contain the thousands of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf involves connecting an “insertion tube” to the leak site so oil can be siphoned to a container vessel at the surface.

The process was supposed to be completed overnight, but aligning the pieces under water proved more complex than expected, and a frame connected to the pipe had to be brought back up to the surface to be adjusted, BP said.

BP’s giant containment box lay idle on the seabed as engineers furiously tried to figure out how to stop it clogging with ice crystals, preparing for attempts to resuscitate their vital mission in the next day or so.

The British energy giant, which owns the lion’s share of the leaking oil and has accepted responsibility for the clean-up, has tried to banish the notion that the so-called “dome” is a “silver bullet” to end the crisis.

The gas hydrates, similar to ice crystals, formed on the inside of the 100-ton (90-tonne) chamber as it neared the seabed nearly a mile (1,500 meters below the surface, making it too buoyant and clogging it up, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters.

Workers have moved the concrete and steel box some 650 feet (200 meters) to the side on the seabed while they evaluate their options.

Since the explosion and sinking last week of the Deepwater Horizon rig, a disaster scenario has emerged with hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil spewing unchecked into the Gulf and moving inexorably northward to the coast.

The spreading black tide threatens wildlife, beaches and one of the world’s most fertile fishing grounds in an area stretching across four states, from Louisiana to Florida.

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, planned to visit the spill area over the weekend to assess the situation first hand, a White House official said.

With up to 200,000 gallons of oil a day spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from a ruptured well, the accident stemming from a sunken offshore rig may soon rival the Exxon Valdez disaster as the worst oil spill in US history.

But Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva did not say when security forces would retake the Red Shirts’ vast protest site, occupied for three weeks and fortified with barricades made from truck tyres and sharpened bamboo poles.

Adding to the tension, the rival Yellow Shirt group, who are backed by the country’s elite, plan to meet on Monday upon the expiry of a deadline they set a week ago for the government to deal with the Reds.