The good news is that BP says its has “significantly cut the flow” of oil from the damaged Deepwater Horizon wellhead.
Jeff Childs, a deputy incident commander for BP, said in a briefing with Alabama officials that the company successfully shut a set of hydraulic shears known as annular rams, helping to clamp the ruptured pipe and block the leaking oil.
“We’ve significantly cut the flow through the pipe,” Childs said at the Mobile briefing hosted by U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa.
Childs said the company was still trying to activate a set of shear rams that are designed to seal the well by shearing off the drill pipe. The job is complicated, he said, because it is occurring at depths of more than 5,000 feet.
The bad news is that the damage is spreading and will likely spread to the U.S. East coast as currents carry the oil far from the original spill …
A sense of doom settled over the American coastline from Louisiana to Florida on Saturday as a massive oil slick spewing from a ruptured well kept growing, and experts warned that an uncontrolled gusher could create a nightmare scenario if the Gulf Stream carries it toward the Atlantic.
The oil slick over the water’s surface appeared to triple in size over the past two days, which could indicate an increase in the rate that oil is spewing from the well, according to one analysis of images collected from satellites and reviewed by the University of Miami. While it’s hard to judge the volume of oil by satellite because of depth, it does show an indication of change in growth, experts said.
“The spill and the spreading is getting so much faster and expanding much quicker than they estimated,” said Hans Graber, executive director of the university’s Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing. “Clearly, in the last couple of days, there was a big change in the size.”
We should really be thanking our lucky stars that this didn’t happen later in the year, in hurricane season. But even if the oil leak is stopped tomorrow, will the spilled oil be cleaned up by June 1, the official start of hurricane season? How about mid-July, when we enter the thick of hurricane season? Somehow, I think not.
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