Storm halts bid by BP to plug ruptured well

— A storm brewing in the Caribbean brought the deep-sea effort to plug the ruptured oil well to a near standstill Wednesday just as BP was getting close to going in for the kill.

Work on the relief well, now just days from completion, was suspended, and the cap that has been keeping the oil bottled up since last week may have to be reopened, allowing crude to gush into the sea again for days, said retiredCoast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man in the crisis.

“This is necessarily going to be a judgment call,” said Allen, who was waiting to see how the storm developed before deciding whether to order any of the ships and crews stationed some 50 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico to head for safety.

The cluster of thunder-storms passed over Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Wednesday, and forecasters said the system would probably move into the Gulf over the weekend. They gave it a 50 percent chance of becoming a tropical depression or a tropical storm by Friday.

Crews had planned to spend Wednesday and today reinforcing with cement the last few feet of the relief tunnel that will be used to pump mud into the gusher and kill it once and for all. But BP put the task on hold and instead placed a temporary plug called a storm packer deep inside the tunnel, in case it has to be abandoned until the storm passes.

“What we didn’t want to do is be in the middle of an operation and potentially put the relief well at some risk,” BP Vice President Kent Wells said.

If the work crews are evacuated, it could be two weeks before they can resume the effort to kill the well. That would upset BP’s timetable, which called for finishing the relief tunnel by the end of July and plugging the blown-out well by early August.

Scientists have been scrutinizing underwater video and pressure data for days, trying to determine whether the capped well is holding tight or is in danger of rupturing and causing an even bigger disaster. If the storm prevents BP from monitoring the well, the cap may simply be reopened, allowing oil to leak into the water, Allen said.

BP and government scientists were meeting to discuss whether the cap could be monitored from shore.

As the storm drew closer, boat captains hired by BP for skimming duty were sent home and told they wouldn’t be going back out for five or six days, said Tom Ard, president of the Orange Beach Fishing Association in Alabama.

In Florida, crews removed booms intended to protect waterways in the panhandle from oil. High winds and storm surge could carry the booms into sensitive wetlands.

Also, Shell Oil began evacuating employees out in the Gulf.

Even if the storm does not hit the area directly, it could affect the effort to contain the oil and clean it up. Hurricane Alex stayed 500 miles away last month, yet oil skimming in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida was curtailed for nearly a week.

The relief tunnel extends about two miles under the seabed and is 50-60 feet vertically and 4 feet horizontally from the ruptured well. BP plans to insert a final string of casing, or drilling pipe, cement it into place and give it up to a week to set before attempting to punch through to the blownout well and kill it.

SURFACE WORK EASES

Oil was reported as gettingharder to find on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, seven days after BP halted the flow from its damaged well.

“We’re really having to search for the oil in some cases,” Allen told reporters in a conference call Wednesday. “We’ve had skimmers out there on the wellhead site for a number of days now, as many as 50 a day.”

The front line for cleanup will move from the waters around the well to the shoreline after oil stops flowing, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Peter Neffenger told the presidential commission investigating the disaster on July 12.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month confirmed that plumes of oil from the well were found as far as 3,300 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf.

Offshore skimmers will be less effective once fresh oil stops hitting the surface and the older oil weathers into tarlike clumps floating below the surface, Neffenger said.

“We’ll be seeing tar-balls and tar-mats for some time to come,” Neffenger said. “You’ll see a lot of those large offshore skimmers pulled out because we won’t need them. But you’ll see a subsequent increase in the amount of shoreline activity.”

Allen said the search for oil has allowed responders “some time to get the vessels in and get them fixed, get our boom fixed and redeploy if we’re going to have anotherevent and also continue to work on a shore cleanup in the marshes.”

REALTORS SUBMIT CLAIMS

The administrator of a $20 billion oil-spill compensation fund said Wednesday that he’s been besieged by real estate agents and brokers, demanding that they become eligible for payments.

Kenneth Feinberg, in congressional testimony, singled out the real estate agents’ demands as one of many tough eligibility decisions he’ll have to make in the coming weeks.

“The Realtors and real estate brokers are a major political force,” he said. “I’m hearing from them constantly. I’m not sure whether they have a valid legal claim. I’m not sure they can win if they litigate.

“If I am going to do justice here, we’ve got to do something.”

HOUSE PASSES LEGISLATION

The U.S. House on Wednesday passed measures to develop new technologies for deepwater drilling and cleaning up oil spills, the first legislation inspired by the BP disaster to reach a floor vote.

One bill, passed on a voice vote, aims to speed up the use of new ways to limit the damage from oil spills and aid the cleanup. Lawmakers said the booms and skiffs BP is using after the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico are the same as units employed in 1989 after the ExxonValdez tanker crashed off the coast of Alaska.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said votes will be scheduled next week on tougher safety standards, changes at the Interior Department and removing the cap on economic damages paid to residents and small businesses by oil companies after spills.

The House also passed on a voice vote a second BP-related bill, to fund research and development for safer oil and gas drilling at the Department of Energy.

In other spill-related news, four oil companies, BP not among them, agreed to pool $1 billion to form a new company that would respond to offshore oil spills. The company would be able to mobilize within 24 hours to capture and contain spills at depths of up to 10,000 feet, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

Additionally, The Times of London quoted unidentified BP sources as saying the company’s chief executive officer, Tony Hayward, planned to step down by September after a series of public-relations blunders, including yacht racing during the spill and saying he wanted his life back. But BP said Hayward still had the full support of its board.

BP’s broken well spewed between 2.2 million and 4.4 million barrels of crude into the Gulf before the latest cap was attached. A barrel equals 42 gallons. The crisis, the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, unfolded after the BPleased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers.

Information for this article was contributed by Colleen Long, Michael Kunzelman, Jay Reeves, Phuong Le, Robert Barr, Chris Kahn and Larry Margasak of The Associated Press; and by Allison Bennett, Jim Polson, Brian K. Sullivan and Jeff Plungis of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/22/2010

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