Gulf Coast officials watch path of oil spill

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Cleanup and containment of a massive oil slick resumed Tuesday as winds eased in the Gulf of Mexico and people along beaches and bayous waited to find out just how badly it might damage the delicate coast.

So far only sheens have reached some coastal waters. The oil has lingered in the Gulf for two weeks, despite an uncapped seafloor gusher. The slow movement has given crews and volunteers time to lay boom in front of shorelines, an effort stymied by choppy seas over the weekend.

Rig operator BP PLC continued to try to cap one of the smaller of three leaks, which if successful, could make it easier to install a containment system over the well.

BP’s chief executive said a containment dome designed to cover the principal leak will be on the seabed Thursday, and will be hooked up to a drill ship over the weekend.

CEO Tony Hayward stressed to reporters in Washington that the procedure had never been done before at a depth of nearly a mile below the water’s surface.

The plan is to cover the leak with a 98-ton concrete-and-metal box structure known as a cofferdam, and funnel the oil to the surface, but Hayward cautioned “there’s no guarantees.”

The uncertainty has been trying for people who live along a swath of the Gulf from Louisiana to Florida. The undersea well has been spewing 200,000 gallons a day since an April 20 explosion aboard the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon that killed 11 workers. The rig was owned by Transocean Ltd.

“The waiting is the hardest part,” said Dodie Vegas, 44, who rents rooms in her Bridge Side Cabins complex in Grand Isle, the southernmost tip of Louisiana.

BP has been unable to shut off the well, but crews have reported progress with a new method for cutting the amount of oil that reaches the surface. Results were encouraging but the approach is still being evaluated, BP and Coast Guard officials said.

The latest satellite image of the slick, taken Sunday night, indicates that it has shrunk since last week, but that only means some of the oil has gone underwater.

The new image found oil covering about 2,000 square miles, rather than the roughly 3,400 square miles observed last Thursday, said Hans Graber of the University of Miami.

The effect on wildlife is still unclear. No oil was found on 29 dead endangered Kemp’s ridley turtles that were examined by experts after washing up on the beaches along the Mississippi coast over the past few days.

Meanwhile, crews haven’t been able to activate a shutout valve underwater. Worse, it could take three months to drill sideways into the well and plug it with mud and concrete to stop the worst U.S. oil spill since the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska, leaking nearly 11 million gallons of crude.

BP said Monday it would compensate people for “legitimate and objectively verifiable” claims from the explosion and spill, but President Barack Obama and others pressed the company to explain exactly what that means.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist toured an Escambia County emergency operations center and said while the Panhandle would see the first impact from the spill, the entire state should be prepared.

“If and when it gets into the Gulf Stream, that will take it around the Gulf of Mexico potentially down to the Keys and up the Atlantic side.

Now, I don’t want to be an alarmist, but I want to be a realist. And I just think we all need to be prepared to do whatever we can to protect our state. It’s precious.”

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and other officials kept up their criticism of BP and the Coast Guard, saying they never provided plans to protect the Louisiana coast from an oil spill.

By all accounts, the disaster is certain to cost BP billions. But analysts said the company could handle it; BP is the world’s third-largest oil company and made more than $6 billion in the first three months of this year. The oil spill has drained $32 billion from BP’s stock market value.