BP Says Crews Make Progress Stemming Oil Leaks
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and HENRY FOUNTAIN
May 3, 2010
nytimes.com
NEW ORLEANS — BP reported some glimmers of progress on Monday in its efforts to stem oil leaks from an undersea well off the Louisiana coast that have created what President Obama called a “potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.”
Bill Salvin, a company spokesman, said that crews had finished building a containment dome, a 4-story, 70-ton structure that the company plans to lower into place over one of the three leaks to catch the escaping oil and allow it to be pumped to the surface. The other two domes would be completed on Tuesday, Mr. Salvin said, and crews hoped to install all three domes by the weekend.
“That will essentially eliminate most of the issues you have with oil in the water,” he said.
The company was also trying on Monday to install a shutoff valve at the site of one of the three leaks. But according to David Nicholas, a BP spokesman, after the stormy weather of the weekend, the seas at the site had still not calmed enough by midafternoon for the valve mechanism to be hoisted safely out of a support ship.
The efforts come as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the oil slick appeared to be drifting toward the Alabama and Florida coasts and the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana’s southern tip.
Miles of floating booms laid out on coastal waters in hopes of protecting the shoreline from the spreading oil slick were damaged over the weekend by the heavy winds and rough seas, the Coast Guard said on Monday. Roughly 80 percent of the boom protecting the Alabama coast was damaged.
“Some of it has been torn apart, some of it is repairable, some was relocated by the weather,” said Petty Officer David Mosley of the Coast Guard. “We’re looking to fix what we can fix and replace what we can replace.”
All told, some 52 miles of booms have been deployed to try to corral the spill or to fend it off from vulnerable shorelines, he said. Crews were checking the condition of more than 6 miles of boom near the Mississippi-Alabama border, and other sections near the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts.
On Monday, BP said it would pay “all necessary and appropriate clean-up costs” from the disaster. Referring to the drilling rig that collapsed April 22 after a fire and explosion, causing the well it was drilling to leak, the company said: “BP takes responsibility for responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We will clean it up.”
BP, which was leasing the Deepwater Horizon rig, has been working with an array of government agencies and private companies but has been unable so far to stop the flow of crude from the well.
President Obama visited Louisiana on Sunday afternoon for a firsthand look at the response effort, which has drawn criticism for the lack of rapid results.
“The oil that is still leaking from the well could seriously damage the economy and the environment of our gulf states, and it could extend for a long time,” Mr. Obama said. “It could jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who call this place home.”
Bob Fryar, the company’s senior vice president for operations in Angola, who was brought to a command center in Houston for the engineering effort, said on Sunday that BP hoped to install a shut-off valve on one of the three leaks on Monday to stop some of the oil flow there. But the leak that is spewing the most oil, at the end of the broken riser pipe that once connected the well with the rig, cannot be shut off that way, Mr. Fryar said.
A device known as a blowout preventer, a towering stack of heavy equipment at the wellhead, 5,000 feet below the surface of the gulf, was supposed to seal the well quickly in the event of a burst of pressure, but it did not work when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded.
On Sunday, Mr. Fryar and Charlie Holt, BP’s drilling operations manager for the gulf, described an audacious plan to confront the blowout preventer problem. In this approach, they would seal the well by cutting the riser at the wellhead, sliding a huge piece of equipment called the riser package out of the way and bolting a second blowout preventer atop the first one.
The risk in attempting such a maneuver — which would be performed, as all the undersea work has been, by robotic submersibles tethered to support ships 5,000 feet above — is that the pressure of the oil rising from the well could be overwhelming, and the well could gush oil at a far higher rate. Mr. Fryar said a pressure gauge would be installed soon to determine if it was safe to attempt the operation.
Speaking of the accident, Mr. Fryar said the blowout preventer “has lots of redundancies, there are lots of opportunities to shut these off — none of these worked.”
Whether the equipment was faulty or it was damaged in the accident was unclear.
Officials still plan to take another step, drilling relief wells that would allow crews to plug the gushing cavity with heavy liquid, to provide a more permanent solution than the containment domes. Drilling work on the first relief well was set to begin “as soon as the weather clears,” Mr. Fryar said on Sunday, with a second to be started in two weeks. But completing the relief wells will take months.
Bad weather and high seas hampered surface cleanup efforts on Sunday, with planes unable to drop chemical dispersants and oil skimmers prevented from corralling the slick.
Mr. Fryar said that for a second day, crews were injecting chemical dispersant into the oil as it flowed from the main leak. Dispersant, which is more conventionally used on the water surface, breaks the oil into small droplets and reduces its buoyancy, so it will sink to the bottom.
Mr. Fryar said technicians were trying to determine whether it would be possible to inject the dispersant directly into the riser deep under the water, so that it would mix better with the flowing oil. “We think this dispersant is highly effective,” he said. “We’re hoping the oil won’t make it to the surface.”
The impact of chemical dispersants on deepwater ecology is unclear.
Closer to land, crews continued to place floating booms and train volunteers in Mississippi and Florida to help minimize the impact if the slick reaches the beach, according to John Curry, head of external affairs at BP.
Speaking to reporters in the rain in Venice, La., after talking with response teams that have amassed on the coast to try to stem the tide of oil lapping the shoreline, Mr. Obama vowed that the government would keep up the pressure on BP.
While he did not criticize the company in his public remarks, Mr. Obama’s comments reflected increased frustration in the administration with BP’s inability to plug the oil leak. The president again reiterated that American taxpayers would not foot the bill.
“BP is responsible for this leak — BP will be paying the bill,” Mr. Obama said.
Initially, Mr. Obama planned not to visit the region until later this week at the earliest, White House officials said Friday afternoon. But by late Friday night, with criticism mounting that the government’s response was too slow, White House officials decided that the president needed to make the trip to the gulf on Sunday.
White House officials sent two Cabinet officials to appear on the Sunday television talk shows with the message that the administration was doing everything it could to take control of the spill and that it had been involved from the beginning. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Fox News Sunday that the government had an “all hands on deck” approach to the disaster.
For Mr. Obama, the widening environmental calamity in the gulf is made even more complicated, politically, by the fact that the spill occurred just a month after he announced he was expanding offshore drilling. He now says that no new leases will be approved until a thorough review of the causes of the BP leak is complete.
“Every American affected by this spill should know this: Your government will do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes to stop this crisis,” Mr. Obama said after his briefing by federal and state officials. He said the spill endangered the “heartbeat of the region’s economic life.”
Mr. Obama met with Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana upon the arrival of Air Force One in New Orleans. Then he went to Venice for two hours — by road, rather than helicopter, because of inclement weather — to look at the response.
He stopped to speak to several fishermen, assuring them that BP would reimburse them for lost earnings. But reimbursement may be one of the largest battles to come, given that federal law sets a limit of $75 million on BP’s liability for damages, apart from the cleanup costs.
“It’s going to be extremely tricky” to reimburse fishermen and others if economic damages tally above $75 million, said Stuart Smith, a New Orleans-based lawyer who is pushing for Congressional action to amend the law. “They may not be obligated to pay more than that unless they agree to do it.”
There is a federal fund, generated from a tax on oil, that may cover as much as $1 billion in damages. |
