BP began its latest effort to stem the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last night. Follow the latest developments as the company takes a ‘top kill′ approach to plugging the pipeline leak
12.21pm:
Hank Stuever, from the Washington Post, has been watching the live coverage of the oil spill too. He’s not overly enamoured with it:
Spillcam combines the dread of horror films with the monotony of Andy Warhol’s eight-hour silent movie of the Empire State Building. There is no sound and nothing happens, except the inexorable, unending flow. You watch a little, and then a little more, and then you can’t stop watching as a steady plume of dark brown oil belches upward from the floodlit, rocky ocean floor.
11.44am:
The second I start whinging in the comments section, the second the video starts streaming again – at least it is on PBS Newshour’s web site.
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11.30am:
The top kill has worked above ground but has never before been tried 5,000 feet beneath the sea. (Keen followers of the Gulf oil spill so far will recall that the same applies to every technique – and let’s face it, there have been many – that BP has employed so far, as there have never been an oil leak this far beneath the surface before).
BP has rated the latest attempt’s chance of success at 60 to 70 percent.
“The absence of any news is good news,” said Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who’s overseeing the operation.
“It’s a wait and see game here right now, so far nothing unfavorable.”
Incidentally, the engineers working to stop the spill have come up with some ingenious names for their efforts so far. From introducing the word ‘cofferdam‘ to a wider audience, to reinventing the top hat as a (failed) device to capture the oil, to the brilliantly named “junk shot″, the terms for BP’s attempts have never failed to capture the imagination.
Yesterday my colleague as conjuring up “a new TV series starring Jeremy Clarkson testing firearms”, and ‘top kill′ is definitely my
favourite so far, although to me it sounds more like a Jean Claude Van Damme film.
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What does the term mean to you? Comment below or email adam.gabbatt@guardian.co.uk if you’re shy.
11.05am:
This interactive graphic by my colleague Paddy Allen show how the top kill should work.
BP’s live feed of the oil leak doesn’t appear to be working, but some other sites have video streams that I’ve had more luck with so far this morning.
The oil company does warn that the stream “may freeze or be unavailable from time to time”, but other sites were running the footage not so long ago when BP was down – PBS news′s footage was working well earlier, although it seems to have stalled now.
I’ll keep looking for reliable streaming of the oil – BP said that throughout the top kill procedure “very significant changes in the appearance of the flows at the seabed may be expected”, which could be exciting.
(Although it did add, disappointingly, that: “These will not provide a reliable indicator of the overall progress, or success or failure, of the top kill operation as a whole.”)
10.40am:
BP began pumping mud into the Macondo well at 7pm BST yesterday – a procedure (slightly) more technically known as ‘top kill’.
This morning the oil company said things are going to plan with the latest attempt to stem the oil flow, or at least did not announce that anything is going wrong:
‘Top kill’ operations continued over the night and are ongoing. There are no significant events to report at this time. BP will provide updates on progress as appropriate.
In addition to watching the progress of the top kill, it will be interesting to see how the markets react to the announcement from the Obama administration that proposed exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean will be suspended until 2011 – potentially disrupting Shell Oil’s plans to begin drilling five exploratory wells this summer.
Yesterday Barack Obama described the disaster as “heartbreaking” while BP chief executive Tony Hayward went for the phrase “absolutely gutted”, in an apparent contest to see who was the most concerned as opinion polls suggest large parts of the US public are dissatisfied with both men.
Follow updates on the top kill, and get all your oil spill news here.
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