Oil surrounded the site of the Deepwater Horizon spill on Monday.
HOUSTON — Unable for six weeks to plug the gushing oil well beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP renewed an effort Monday to use a dome to funnel some of the leaking crude to a tanker on the surface. A similar attempt failed three weeks ago, but officials said they had resolved some of the technical problems that forced them to abort last time.
If successful — and after the string of failures so far, there is no guarantee it will be — the containment dome may be able to capture most of the oil, but it would not plug the leak. Its failure would mean continued environmental and economic damage to the gulf region, as well as greater public pressure on BP and the Obama administration, with few options remaining for trying to contain the spill any time soon.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. plans to visit the Gulf Coast on Tuesday and meet with state attorneys general. Several senators have asked the Justice Department to determine whether any laws were broken in the spill.
A lasting solution for the leak may be months away, after engineers complete the drilling of a relief well, which would allow them to plug the leaking well with cement.
On Monday, engineers positioned submarine robots that will try to shear off a collapsed 21-inch riser pipe with a razorlike wire studded with bits of industrial diamonds. If that is achieved, officials will need at least a couple of days to position a domelike cap over the blowout preventer, which failed to shut off the well when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers.
The trapped oil would then be funneled through a hose to ships floating near the well.
But, like all of BP's efforts so far, this method had never been tried at such depths before this spill. Moreover, if kinks in the riser are now reducing the amount of oil escaping, cutting the riser could unleash a greater flow. And the greatest worry of all may be the potential arrival of hurricanes in the gulf; hurricane season officially begins on Tuesday.
Engineers and technicians working on the response said that an active hurricane season, which is predicted by meteorologists, could not only push more oil ashore, but also cause weeks of delays in efforts to contain the spill.
rest at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/us/01spill.html?th&emc=th
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