Crews set to burn oil leaking in Gulf

THE US Coast Guard said it was to start a “controlled burn” yesterday to battle a giant oil slick from last week’s deadly offshore drilling rig explosion, as the spill threatened wide-scale coastal damage to four US Gulf Coast states.

Response boats worked to clean up oil where the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank. The leaking well, 5,000 feet under the ocean surface off Louisiana’s coast, has created an oil sheen and emulsified crude slick with a circumference of about 600 miles, covering about 74,000sq km, the Coast Guard said.

Swiss-based Transocean Ltd’s Deepwater Horizon rig sank on April 22, two days after it exploded and caught fire while finishing a well for BP Plc about 40 miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River. Eleven rig workers are missing and presumed dead in what is the worst oil rig disaster in almost a decade.

To control the spill, workboats will pool segments of the spill inside a fire-resistant “boom” that will be towed to a remote area for burning.

The Coast Guard said its plan calls for “small, controlled burns” of several hundred gallons each that will last about an hour.

At midday yesterday, the edge of the spill was 23 miles off the coast of Louisiana, close to a fragile system of coastal estuaries and swamps teeming with birds and other wildlife. A shift in winds could push the spill inland to the Louisiana coast by this weekend, say forecasters at AccuWeather.

As the oil spill grows, so does the chance that it will impact efforts by the Congress and President Barack Obama to open more offshore areas to limited oil and gas drilling.

Preparations were underway to deploy thousands of feet of floating booms in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama in an attempt to keep the oil slick from reaching sensitive shore areas.

The spill is not comparable with the Exxon Valdez disaster, which spilled about 11 million gallons of oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska when it ran aground in 1989. BP’s well is spewing about 42,000 gallons of oil a day into the ocean.

It is the worst oil rig disaster since 2001, when a rig operated by Petrobras off Brazil exploded and killed 11 workers.

London-based BP Plc, which owns the well and is financially responsible for the clean-up, is spending $6 million a day on a massive on-sea clean-up effort involving dozens of ships and aircraft.