Angry President Obama flies in as oil hits Florida


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Washington, 05 June 2010:  President Obama, at the mercy of events and unproven technologies, flew to Louisiana yesterday for the third time since the Deepwater Horizon blowout to console those living along the state’s polluted coast and to find out whether BP may finally be winning the race to cap the well.

The President’s feet had barely touched the ground before he hit out at BP, accusing the British company of “nickel and diming” residents along the Gulf of Mexico coast over damage claims while spending billions in shareholder dividends.

Mr Obama’s latest flying visit followed a drastic decision by the White House to postpone for a second time a long-planned presidential visit to Indonesia and Australia. It came as tar balls and oil sheen washed ashore for the first time on the beaches of northwest Florida and a computer simulation showed oil being carried by currents thousands of miles into the Atlantic at 100 miles a day.

High hopes of a breakthrough at the well head were already being tempered last night as BP and Mr Obama — who has described himself as “furious” over the delays of the past six weeks — waited to see how much oil the latest cap lowered over the well would funnel to the surface.

The “top cap” was installed on Thursday night after giant shears were used to make a rough cut through the well’s broken riser pipe where a diamond-tipped saw blade had become stuck the day before.

BP said that the cap should eventually capture up to 90 per cent of the oil, and Admiral Thad Allen, of the US Coast Guard, said that the device was already sending it towards a giant surface storage ship at a rate of 1,000 barrels a day, a fraction of the 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day pouring from the well. How much was reaching the surface remained unclear. However, the company insisted that the flow would increase steadily as four specially built vents on the cap were closed one by one. The vents are designed to prevent the build-up of ice-like crystals that blocked the riser pipe the last time a hood was lowered over the well.

Doug Suttles, the BP chief operating officer, said: “I’m pretty confident this is going to work. It probably won’t capture all of the flow but it should capture the vast majority.”

Mr Obama said that progress was being made but it was “way too early to be optimistic”.

Even if the cap does hold most of the spill, it comes too late for 125 miles of Louisiana coastline and what locals call “the world’s whitest beaches” along the Florida Panhandle. Sticky brown lumps of tar were washing ashore yesterday near Pensacola, the region’s main naval and resort town, and with the main slick seven to nine miles offshore the near-total fouling of beaches seems inevitable. So far more than 550 oiled birds have been found dead along the Louisiana shore — “but you find only a small number”, Sharon Taylor, of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said. “Most die at sea.”

At Grand Isle, west of the Mississippi Delta, black humour has combined with local commercial instincts and the unwelcome black gold to produce the $2 “Tar Ball Shot” at the Doc o’ the Bay bar, made from dark grape jelly and Jägermeister liqueur.

Comments on this Article
Felix Martis, Udupi Fri, June-4-2010, 9:49
This oil spill has been a real night mare to British Petroleum. We never know how much it is going to damage the environement.
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