Here's a link to a page with live camera feeds of all the ROV cams in one place. Kinda fascinating.

They are very cool and work like a person, hang on with one hand and work with the other. BTW they are the size of a mini van.

Gotta be a very tricky thing, working like that at 5000 ft down. There's a lot of activity right now- I guess they are preparing to pressure test the new cap, or something.

The Obama administration has stopped the test because of concerns that the pressure could be too great for the valves to handle, like what happened during the "topkill" procedure. They want to wait for the wellbores coming in from the sides to pump concrete or whatever they use in. The experts I've seen on TV agree with this stoppage.

Black wave heading for the Eastern Seaboard
 

Catman you really need to read some less radical stuff! :D

They show that as a dye sample. Well oil is not going to travel at the same rate as dye will and it will not travel in the same direction as dye will. Not trying to down play the severity of this mess but getting your news from people that say this oil spill was to "feed the war machine" is a little over the top.

Not exactly... those valves are plenty strong. The issue is with the well casing. That is the thing around the drill tube. They are worried that it was damaged during the 'junk shot' attempt and if they shut the oil down, then the resulting pressure will breach the casing. Think of a garden hose with a hole in it and what happens when you open and close the nozzle. If that casing gives way, it's a worst case scenario. What they are doing now is slowly closing the valves and monitoring pressure at the well head. If there's low pressure, then there's a big problem.

there was never too great of pressure in top kill.

Not trying to start an argument, just my opinion here, but...

Really? Care to provide a link to this fact?

I'm no expert and can only repeat what I have read about this, so here's a little thought experiment:

Pressure at well head from escaping oil is 3500-5000 psi IIRC.
Pump used to deliver "kill shot" is 80,000 hp.
How much psi is required to push 'X' cubic feet of mat'l (shredded tires, golf balls, whatever) through a mile of pipe?
How much add'l pressure is needed to overcome the force of the escaping oil and inject the mat'l into the well?

Remember how they stopped the top kill attempt rather abruptly? They never publicly said why, but there was a lot of chatter about it on sites like the Oil Drum. The speculation is that the casing was damaged. That's gotta be fairly stout pipe and imho it was more than 'never too great a pressure' that was used.

Look at the live feed of the well -- that chit is blasting out that hole.
:(

Here's a good article with some links on BP's sh!tty safety record.

Except today's New York Times makes a pretty persuasive case that BP really did stand out in its disregard for safety, and that not all oil companies are equal. First up, Jad Mouwad wrote a profile of ExxonMobil, which revamped its management culture after the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in 1989, and now "stands out among its peers for its obsessive attention to safety." In fact, back in 2006, Exxon ran into problems in a deepwater well similar to what BP faced at Macondo—natural gas kicking up—and the company decided to abandon the well rather than keep drilling. (Exxon was savaged by financial analysts at the time, but the decision looks pretty shrewd in retrospect.)

The picture looks very different when you turn to the Times' excellent profile of BP. The company has a long record of safety violations—in 2005, an aging BP plant in Texas exploded, killing 15 people, and an after-action report blamed "organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of BP." Then came a large leak that poured 267,000 gallons of oil into Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in 2006, thanks to poorly maintained pipes. And just this year, federal inspectors have found 62 safety violations at BP's Ohio refinery. Yet BP never underwent the same cultural shift that ExxonMobil underwent. And, so, in retrospect, it's no surprise that BP cut so many corners:

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