BP’s chief executive said the oil company wasn’t completely prepared to deal with a disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, a newspaper reported yesterday.
The Financial Times quoted Tony Hayward as saying it was “an entirely fair criticism” that the company wasn’t fully ready.
“What is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit,” Hayward was quoted as saying.
However, Hayward said BP had been successful so far in keeping most of the oil away from the southeastern US coast.
“Considering how big this has been, very little has got away from us,” Hayward was quoted as saying.
Hayward said the April 20 explosion on an oil rig that caused the leak was a “one in a million chance,” but that risk needed to be cut to one in a billion or even one in a trillion.
Robot submarines plying the dark, frigid depths of the Gulf of Mexico made halting progress in BP’s latest bid to siphon off oil belching from its ruptured wellhead, but tar balls and other debris from the spill posed new threats to the region’s shoreline.
While BP PLC inched ahead with its new plan to contain the undersea gusher, Hayward retreated from yet another public relations gaffe — apologizing for his widely reported remark that “I want my life back.”
The BP oil spill, which began last month, is causing an ecological and economic catastrophe along the US Gulf Coast.
In early European trading yesterday, BP shares rose 4.2 percent. Shares in the British energy giant, down dramatically since the accident began in April, had stabilized on Wednesday after sharp declines in London and Wall Street on Tuesday.
BP’s latest attempted fix hit a snag on Wednesday when a diamond-tipped saw got lodged in the deep-sea pipe through which oil is billowing into the Gulf. But BP freed the cutting tool after several hours of tricky maneuvering of its robot submarines, paving the way for the process to continue, a source familiar with the work told Reuters.
Many thousands of fishermen, shrimpers and other seafood workers have been idled for weeks by government-imposed fishing restrictions that were expanded on Wednesday to cover 37 percent of US federal waters in the Gulf.
In the struggle to minimize shoreline encroachment of oil, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal won White House approval on Wednesday for a controversial plan to essentially manufacture several new barrier islands off his state with sand dredged from the sea floor. Louisiana has been hardest hit so far by the oil slick.
The fragmented, far-flung oil slick posed a growing threat to several parts of Gulf Coast. Toxic goo from the spill crept to within 16km of Florida’s northwest panhandle, where officials said it could make landfall by today.
One of the first populated areas soiled earlier by tar balls from the spill, the popular Alabama resort town and bird sanctuary of Dauphin Island, was hit this week with a new wave of oil blobs that also started washing up in Mississippi.
The spill was unleashed by an April 20 explosion that wrecked the BP-contracted Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig and killed 11 crewmen. The last best hope of gaining some control over the worst US oil spill in history was concentrated 1.6km beneath the surface of the Gulf.
After a fruitless three-day attempt to plug up the crippled wellhead with drilling mud, BP embarked late on Tuesday on a new strategy to curtail the flow of oil that has been escaping into the Gulf at the rate of up to 3 million liters a day.
The latest plan calls for cutting away the leaking riser pipe protruding from the failed blowout preventer, then lowering a containment cap onto the remaining wellhead assembly to trap much of the escaping oil and funnel it to the surface.
The operation was expected to take 72 hours to complete. Officials have warned that the flow of oil could temporarily increase by as much as 20 percent between the time the riser pipe is severed and the containment cap is lowered into place.
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