The most recent attempt at staunching the oil spilling from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig into the Gulf of Mexico appears to have worked:
Reporting from Houma, La.
Engineers have succeeded in stopping the flow of oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico from a gushing BP well, the federal government’s top oil spill commander, Adm. Thad Allen, said Thursday morning.The so-called “top kill” effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers in Houston, has pumped enough drilling fluid to block all oil and gas from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well is very low, but persistent, he said.
Once engineers have reduced the well pressure to zero, they will begin to pump cement into the hole to entomb the well. To help that effort, he said, engineers are also pumping some debris into the blowout preventer at the top of the well.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed. We’re dealing with physical processes here and they’re processes that are happening under conditions we really don’t know an enormous amount about and in which working is extremely difficult. The fix may hold, it may require additional measures, or something else may need to be tried.
But for now it looks as though the spill is over. Determining the scope of the problem and doing the cleanup has just begun.
And, of course, the finger-pointing, recriminations, futile gestures, and posturing are barely in their infancy.
