BP FAIL! BP engineers again fail to plug the gushing oil well on Saturday

Another day, another failure for BP. After weeks and weeks of arrogance, failures to plug to gushing oil, and being exposed yesterday for busing in 400 workers to clean a beach for Obama’s photo op, BP engineers failed again to plug the gushing oil well on Saturday, a technician working on the project said, representing yet another setback in a series of unsuccessful procedures the company has tried a mile under the sea to stem the flow spreading into the Gulf of Mexico. Not to worry though. OILbama  is in charge as he pops off to Chicago to vacation over the week and skip the wreath laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday. According to the New York Times, BP made a third attempt Friday night at what is termed the “junk shot,” a procedure that involves pumping odds and ends like plastic cubes, knotted rope, and golf balls into the blowout preventer, the five-story safety device atop the well. The maneuver is complementary to the heavily scrutinized effort known as a “top kill,”which began four days ago and involves pumping heavy mud into the well to counteract the push of the escaping oil. If the well is sealed, the company plans to then fill it with cement.

The technician working on the project said Saturday pumping had again been halted and a review of the data so farwas under way. “Right now, I would not be optimistic,” the technician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the effort. But he added, that if another attempt at the junk shot were to succeed, “that would turn things around.”

BP said Saturday it would not comment on the technician’s assertions Doug Suttles the chief operating officer, said at a news conference in Fourchon Beach, La. said that it was too soon to tell whether the procedure was working. He said it was a process of stopping and starting and reevaluating.

“We’re going to keep at this until we see if it will work or not work,” he said. “If we believe it will work we should stay with it as long as it takes,” he said. “If we think it won’t we will go on to the next.”

The top kill remains the company’s best option for stopping the leak that is polluting gulf waters at an estimated 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. If it does not work Mr. Suttles said the company was going to move to a “lower marine riser package cap” – a technology that would involve sawing off the riser and placing a device atop it to -capture the escaping oil.

Mr. Suttles said preparation for that alternative plan was already underway just in case. Equipment is deployed on land and on the sea bed, he said.

If these options are not successful, it may take until August to drill a relief well, the option experts say is most reliably going to stop the current catastrophe.

“People want to know which technique is going to work, and I don’t know. It hasn’t been done at these depths and that’s why we’ve had multiple options working parallel.”

Mr. Suttles also used the press conference Saturday to defend BP’s clean-up efforts, which have come under fierce criticism from local politicians for being too little too late.

“We have been ramping up the activity every single day,” he said referring to the workers that are being brought in to mop up the rust-colored goo that is washing ashore along the coast here. “We and the Coast Guard are bringing in additional resources,” he said.

BP estimates it has nearly 2,000 workers already along the coast according to David Nicholas, BP spokesman. Mr. Suttles said the company was somewhat hampered in its efforts to be aggressive by the delicate nature of the ecosystem. “We don’t want to create more harm in doing the cleanup than the oil creates on its own,” he said.

Nevertheless, he added, BP was not only bringing in more people it was working on ways to get them to more inaccessible areas of the coast. He said they were going to start using tent cities and “flo-tels,” or floating hotels, to house workers closer to hard to reach marsh lands being covered with oil.

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May 29, 2010 · Filed Under oil spill


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