British Petroleum readied to launch an unprecedented effort yesterday to contain a widening oil leak with a giant dome amid signs of growing political fallout across the US from the disaster.
BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said that the company had fashioned the first of three domes designed to be placed yesterday “over the leak sources and allow us to collect the oil, funnel it up through pipework to a drill ship called Enterprise on the surface.”
However, even as the company was putting in place new ways to contain the epic oil slick, the political impact of the crisis was being felt clear across the US, as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday backed away from a contentious drilling proposal off the state’s southern coast.
PHOTO: AFP
“It will not happen here in California,” he said at a news conference. “You turn on the television and you see this enormous disaster and you say to yourself ‘Why would we want to take that risk?’ The risk is much greater than the money is worth.”
Weekend storms grounded aerial sorties of dispersants and prevented skimming vessels from mopping up the growing 200km by 110km slick, which could wreak huge economic and environmental damage on the fragile region.
However, an army of more than 2,500 responders and some 200 boats took advantage of better forecasts Monday to lay out kilometers of protective booms, relaunch skimming vessels and train local fishermen for the cleanup effort.
“It’s looking better,” said Petty Officer Curtis Ainsley, the leader of a US Coast Guard team surveying the widening slick and installing protective boom stations on boats.
“If we can get the seas to lay down for us we can make a dent,” Ainsley said. “As soon as we can get the vessels here and the booms laid down we can get started skimming.”
A vast amount of crude, estimated to be at least 795,000 liters a day, has been streaming from the wellhead below the Deepwater Horizon rig that sank on April 22, two days after a massive explosion that killed 11 workers.
The latest satellite image of the oil slick indicates it has shrunk since last week, but scientists say that only means some of the oil has gone underwater.
Hans Graber of the University of Miami Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing said Monday the new image found oil covering about 5,200km². The slick was roughly 8,800km² Thursday last week.
Graber says the apparent shrinkage came about because some of the oil that had been visible at the surface has been mixed into the water, as strong winds have kicked up waves.
The new image also shows that patches of oil have begun to break away from it. But it’s not clear when any sizable amount of oil will reach land.
Meanwhile, BP said on Monday that it will pay for all the cleanup costs. The company posted a fact sheet on its Web site saying it took responsibility for the spill and would pay compensation for legitimate claims for property damage, personal injury and commercial losses.
“We are responsible, not for the accident, but we are responsible for the oil and for dealing with it and cleaning the situation up,” chief executive Tony Hayward said on Monday on ABC television.
He said the equipment that failed on the rig and led to the spill belonged to owner Transocean, not BP, which operated the rig.
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