Engineers wait to see if oil spill repair succeeds

Engineers were today anxiously waiting to see if their experimental repair attempt on the blown Gulf of Mexico oil rig would succeed.

They began pumping heavy mud into the undersea well, but BP said it will not know until tomorrow if the plan has worked.

If the risky procedure, known as a top kill, stops the flow of oil to the surface, BP would then inject cement into the well to seal it.

“The absence of any news is good news,” said Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is overseeing the operation.

“We’re doing everything we can to bring it to closure, and actually we’re executing this top kill job as efficiently and effectively as we can,” BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said.

Fishermen, hotel and restaurant owners, politicians and residents along the coast are angry with BP’s failures to stop the oil that is coating Louisiana’s marshes and wildlife and are now turning against President Barack Obama and his administration.

Polls show the public is unhappy with their handling of the catastrophe. Mr Obama is heading to the region tomorrow.

The leak, which has spewed at least seven million gallons of crude into the Gulf, began after an offshore drilling rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers.

Dozens of witness statements show a combination of equipment failure and a deference to the chain of command aboard the rig impeded the system that should have stopped it before it became an environmental disaster.

Additional leaks springing from the top kill solution pose a grave risk, said Anil Kulkarni, a mechanical engineering professor.

“One scenario is that it may make things worse,” he said. “If it ruptures all over, then it would be even more difficult to close it.”

Mr Suttles said engineers were monitoring the well’s pressure readings constantly to determine how much oil was escaping.

If the repair does not work, the company had several backup plans, including sealing the well’s blow-out preventer with a smaller cap, which would contain the oil. An earlier attempt to cap the blow-out preventer failed. BP could also try a “junk shot” – shooting debris into the blow-out preventer to clog it up - during the top kill process.

Last week, the company inserted a mile-long tube to siphon some of the oil into a tanker. The tube sucked up 924,000 gallons of oil, but engineers had to dismantle it during the top kill.

A permanent solution would be to drill a second well to stop the leak, but that was expected to take a couple months.

Some 100 miles of Louisiana coastline has now been hit by the oil.