Engineers finally figured out how to siphon some of the oil that has been spewing into the Gulf for almost a month, but it may be too late to stop the ooze from reaching a major ocean current that could carry it through the Florida Keys and up the East Coast.
After weeks of failed attempts, BP PLC crews on Sunday hooked up a 1.6km long tube to funnel the crude from a blown well into a tanker ship.
However, experts continued to express concern as to the uncertain ecological impact of the spill.
Dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, William Hogarth said one computer model shows oil has already entered the loop current, while a second shows the oil just 4.8 kilometers from it.
“This can’t be passed off as ‘it’s not going to be a problem’ ... This is a very sensitive area. We are concerned with what happens in the Florida Keys,” Hogarth said.
The damage is already done, the only remaining question is how much more is to come, said Paul Montagna from the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University.
BP previously said the tube, if successful, was expected to collect most of the oil gushing from the well. The first chance to choke off the flow for good should come in about a week. Engineers plan to shoot heavy mud into the crippled blowout preventer on top of the well, then permanently entomb the leak in concrete. If that doesn’t work, crews also can shoot golf balls and knotted rope into the nooks and crannies of the device to plug it, BP’s senior vice president for exploration and production Kent Wells said.
Top officials in US President Barack Obama’s administration urged caution
“We will not rest until BP permanently seals the wellhead, the spill is cleaned up and the communities and natural resources of the Gulf Coast are restored and made whole,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said in a joint statement.
Meanwhile, researchers said huge underwater plumes of oil discovered in recent days could poison and suffocate sea life across the food chain, with damage that could endure for a decade or more.
Professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia, Samantha Joye described the hazards of the oil plumes as twofold. The oil itself can prove toxic to fish, while vast amounts of oxygen is also being sucked from the water by microbes that eat oil. Dispersants used to fight the oil also are food for the microbes, speeding up oxygen depletion.
The government initially estimated the spill at 794,913 liters a day, a figure that has since been questioned by some scientists who fear it could be far more. BP executives have stood by the estimate while acknowledging there’s no way to know for sure.
Steve Shepard, chairman of the Gulf Coast group of the Sierra Club in Mississippi, said the BP solution to siphon off some of the oil as “hopefully the beginning of the end of this leak.”
He, like others, expressed concern that much more than that estimated is leaking and that the long-term damage is hard to measure.
“We have a lot to be worried about ... We are in uncharted territory,” he said.
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