Robot subs make fresh attempt to stop Gulf leak

Robot submarines made another risky attempt to control the underwater Gulf oil leak today as the the surface pollution spread, closing in on Florida.

BP’s stock plummeted and took much of the market down with it, and the US government announced criminal and civil investigations into the spill.

After six weeks of failures to block the well or divert the oil, the latest mission involved using a set of tools akin to a giant slicer and garden shears to break away the broken riser pipe so engineers can then position a cap over the well’s opening.

Even if it succeeds, it will temporarily increase the flow of an already massive leak by 20% – at least 100,000 gallons more a day. That is on top of the estimated 500,000 to one million gallons that has already been lost.

In Florida, officials confirmed an oil sheen about nine miles from the famous white sands of Pensacola beach. Crews shored up miles of boom and prepared for the mess to make landfall.

Florida would be the fourth state hit. Crude has already been reported along barrier islands in Alabama and Mississippi, and it has impacted 125 miles of Louisiana coastline.

More federal fishing waters were closed, too, another setback for one of the region’s most important industries. More than one-third of federal waters were off-limits for fishing, along with hundreds of square miles of state waters.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who visited the Gulf yesterday to survey the fragile coastline and meet state and federal prosecutors, would not say who might be targeted in the probes into the largest oil spill in US history.

“We will closely examine the actions of those involved in the spill. If we find evidence of illegal behaviour, we will be extremely forceful in our response,” Mr Holder said.

The federal government also stepped up its response to the spill with President Barack Obama ordering the co-chairmen of an independent commission investigating the spill to thoroughly examine the disaster, “to follow the facts wherever they lead, without fear or favour.”

The president said that if laws are insufficient, they will be changed.

If BP’s new effort to contain the leak fails, the procedure will have made the biggest oil spill in US history even worse.

“It is an engineer’s nightmare,” said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental sciences. “They’re trying to fit a 21-inch cap over a 20-inch pipe a mile away. That’s just horrendously hard to do. It’s not like you and I standing on the ground pushing – they’re using little robots to do this.”

Since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, eventually collapsing into the Gulf of Mexico, up to 40 million gallons of oil has escaped, eclipsing the 11 million that leaked from the Exxon Valdez disaster.

BP said that although there is no guarantee the company’s latest cut-and-cap effort to close off the leak will work, they remained hopeful.

The British oil giant has tried and failed repeatedly to halt the flow of the oil, and this attempt like others has never been tried before a mile beneath the ocean. Experts warned it could be even riskier than the others because slicing open the riser could unleash more oil if there was a kink in the pipe that restricted some of the flow.

But BP’s best chance to actually plug the leak rests with a pair of relief wells but those will probably not be completed until August.

The company has carefully prepared the next phase, knowing that another failure could mean millions more gallons spew into the ocean and lead to even more public pressure. And they say they have learned valuable lessons from the failure of a bigger version of the containment cap last month that was clogged with icelike slush.