BP claims milestone in oil spill clean-up

BP claimed a key milestone yesterday in the effort to plug its blown-out well as a government report said much of the spilled oil is gone, heartening officials who have taken heat during the tricky clean-up but leaving some Gulf Coast residents still sceptical.

BP reported that mud that forced down the well overnight was pushing the crude back down its source for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon rigexploded off Louisianaon April 20, killing 11 workers.

A federal report released yesterday indicated that only about a quarter of the spilled oil remains in the Gulf, with the rest having been contained, cleaned up or otherwise disappeared.

US President Barack Obama, while noting that people’s lives “have been turned upside down,” declared in Washington that the operation was “finally close to coming to an end”.

The containment effort isn’t over. Crews performing the so-called “static kill” effort overnight now must decide whether to follow up by pumping cement down the broken wellhead. Federal officials said they won’t declare complete victory until they also pump in mud and then cement from the bottom of the well, and that won’t happen for several weeks.

“We’ve pretty much made this well not a threat, but we need to finish this from the bottom,” said retired Coast Guard Adm Thad Allen, the government’s point man on the spill response.

Nearly 75% of the oil — more than 152 million gallons — has been collected at the well by a temporary containment cap, been cleaned up or chemically dispersed, or naturally deteriorated, evaporated or dissolved, according to a report by the Interior Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It was captured. It was skimmed. It was burned. It was contained. Mother Nature did her part,” White House energy adviser Carol Browner said on NBC’s Today show.

That leaves about 53.5 million gallons in the Gulf.

A 75-ton cap placed on the well in July has been keeping the oil bottled up inside over the past three weeks but was considered only a temporary measure. BP and the Coast Guard wanted to plug up the hole with a column of heavy drilling mud and cement to seal it off more securely.

More than 205m gallons gushed from the well in total, according to government estimates. Crews managed to burn, skim or siphon off more than 30m gallons in the days after.

Charter boat captain Randy Boggs, of Orange Beach, Alabama, said yesterday he has a hard time believing BP’s claims of success with the static kill and similarly dismissed the idea that only a quarter of the oil remains in the Gulf.

“There are still boats out there every day working, finding turtles with oil on them and seeing grass lines with oil in it,” said Boggs, 45. “Certainly all the oil isn’t accounted for. There are millions of pounds of tar balls and oil on the bottom.”

In the town of Yscloskey, Louisiana, crabber Oliver Rudesill, 28, said he has been out of business like most of his buddies, some of whom are doing clean-up for BP instead but are earning about a quarter of what they do fishing.

“As soon as BP gets this oil out of sight, they’ll get it out of mind, and we’ll be left to deal with it alone,” he said on Tuesday.