One day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar threatened to push BP out of the way if the company does not stop the Gulf oil spill soon, the Obama administration has walked back that threat. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Salazar said, "There are areas where BP and the private sector are the ones who must continue to lead the efforts with government oversight, such as the deployment of private sector technology 5,000 feet below the ocean’s surface to kill the well." Or as Coast Guard commandant Thad Allen put it, "To push BP out of the way, it would raise a question: Replace them with what?"
"It’s worse than politics," said Larry Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, which is partly financed by the oil industry, tells the Times. "[The administration] have had the authority from Day 1. If they could have handled this situation better, they would have already." The Washington Post reports that Obama's famously unflappable facade is starting to crack behind closed doors, and he reportedly interrupted one of his aides during a disaster briefing with the order, "Plug the damn hole."
Tomorrow, BP will attempt the "top kill," which involves shooting heavy mud into the well to slow the oil flow, then using cement to seal the well. BP says there is a 60 to 70 percent chance of success, and if that doesn't work they will either try the "junk shot" (clogging the opening with golf balls and pieces of tire and rope) or try to lower a new blowout preventer on top of the 450-ton one that failed. If all that fails, Allen predicts it may be August before the leak is stopped through the completion of a relief well.
This morning Carol Browner, assistant to the president for energy and climate change, told Good Morning America that the spill would undoubtedly be the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Though BP and the Coast Guard have said about 210,000 gallons of oil a day is gushing from the well, independent experts contend the amount is significantly higher. After studying the video, Steve Wereley, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, estimates that 3.9 million gallons a day is spewing from two leaks. (A researcher at Columbia University says the leak is between 840,000 to 4.2 million gallons a day.) Using Wereley's stimate, the total amount leaked to date is 126 million gallons—more than 11 times the total leaked from the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, CBS reports.
