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May 16, 2:50 PM EDT

BP: Mile-long tube sucking oil away from Gulf well

By JEFFREY COLLINS and JASON DEAREN
Associated Press Writers

Hans Graber, the director of the University of Miami's Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing, says he hopes the siphoning attempt under way in the Gulf can stop the oil leak from the source.

HAMMOND, La. (AP) -- In the first step in nearly a month toward stopping a massive Gulf of Mexico oil leak, BP said a mile-long tube was siphoning most of the crude from a blown well to a tanker ship after three days of wrestling to get the stopgap measure into place on the seafloor.

BP spokesman Mark Proegler said the contraption was hooked up successfully and sucking most of the oil from the leak. Engineers remotely guiding robot submersibles had worked since Friday to place the tube into a 21-inch pipe nearly a mile below the sea.

Previous attempts to use emergency valves and a 100-ton container had failed to stop the leak that has spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, threatening sea life, commercial fishing and the coastal tourist industry from Louisiana to Florida. BP PLC has also been burning small amounts of floating oil and spraying chemical dispersants above and below the surface.

Researchers, meanwhile, warned Sunday that miles-long underwater plumes of oil from the spill could poison and suffocate sea life across the food chain, with damage that could endure for a decade or more.

Researchers have found more underwater plumes of oil than they can count from the blown-out well, said Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia. She said careful measurements taken of one plume showed it stretching for 10 miles, with a 3-mile width.

The hazardous effects of the plume are twofold. Joye said the oil itself can prove toxic to fish swimming in the sea, while vast amount of oxygen are also being sucked from the water by microbes that eat oil. Dispersants used to fight the oil are also food for the microbes, speeding up the oxygen depletion.

"So, first you have oily water that may be toxic to certain organisms and also the oxygen issue, so there are two problems here," said Joye, who's working with a group of scientists who discovered the underwater plumes in a recent boat expedition to the Gulf. "This can interrupt the food chain at the lowest level, and will trickle up and certainly impact organisms higher. Whales, dolphins and tuna all depend on lower depths to survive."

She said it could take years or even decades for the ecosystem to recover.

Oil has been spewing since the rig Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20, killing 11 people and sinking two days later.

BP has been casting about for ways to contain the leak since it was discovered several days after the blast. First robot submarines were unable to get valves to work on machinery at the well head called the blowout preventer. Then the company failed to capture the oil with a 100-ton box after icelike crystals formed in it.

A relief well, considered the permanent solution the leak, is still being drilled and is months away from completion.

© 2010 The Associated Press

sigh.......

A good first step.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

The big problem now.

"The company's efforts to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico come as the existing slick has begun to touch shorelines and come closer to currents that could carry plumes of oil suspended beneath the surface out of the Gulf to areas much further away, including the Florida Keys.

Late Saturday night, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a 72-hour forecast that warned, "As the winds weaken, ocean models indicate the southern edge of the plume could begin moving more to the SW and potentially into the Loop Current."
"

More hope for the future

"BP said that while it tries to siphon oil up its new insertion pipe, it was also making preparations to "kill" the damaged well at the sea surface by pumping drilling mud at higher pressure and weight than the oil. The mud would be pumped at more than 30,000 horsepower engine through three-inch hoses and through "choke" valves at the bottom of the blowout preventer near the sea floor. He said the valves could shoot up to 40 barrels a minute of mud into the well.

"We'll be able to pump much faster than the well can flow," he said. "It's about us outrunning the well."

Wells said the company had brought 50,000 barrels of the mud, a mixture of clay and other substances, for the effort, which he said should be far more than needed. He said that the much ridiculed "junk shot," in which golf balls and shredded tires would be fired into the blowout preventer, would only be used if the drilling mud were being forced upward and needed to be blocked.

Wells said it would be another week to 10 days before preparations for what the company has called the "top kill" effort would be complete."

The last man off the rig is going to tell some of his story on 60 Minutes right now. I hope this episode will be on youtube soon so those who didn't see it can watch it there.

All the lifeboats left without him, he had to jump...

"I knew then that something bad was getting ready to happen."

The Arabian gulf which had nearly 30 Times the Exxon spill dumped in it by the Iraqis , I could see no damage or find any Oil, the water was crystal clear.

Is there something different about the oils then? Because as you can see, this Gulf oil is very thick and clinging to everything.

The Kuwaiti oil was 5-6 inches thick, the Mexican Ixtoc was a major spill and nothing remains.

Nothing remains?? Well maybe, but Ixtoc certainly caused a lot of damage, which the Mexican govt. did not pay for;

In the next nine months, experts and divers (including Red Adair[5]) were brought in to contain and cap the oil well. Approximately an average of ten thousand to thirty thousand barrels per day were discharged into the Gulf until it was finally capped on 23 March 1980.[6] Prevailing currents carried the oil towards the Texas coastline. The US government had two months to prepare booms to protect major inlets. Eventually, in the US, 162 miles (261 km) of beaches and 1421 birds were affected by 3,000,000 barrels (480,000 m3) of oil.[6] Mexico rejected US requests to be compensated for cleanup costs.

The oil slick surrounded Rancho Nuevo, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which is one of the few nesting sites for Kemp's Ridley sea turtles. Thousands of baby sea turtles were airlifted to a clean portion of the Gulf of Mexico to help save the rare species.