BP Thursday completed a second cut on a fractured pipe connected to the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico, paving the way for engineers to install a containment device that officials hope will send the majority of the oil to a ship on the water’s surface a mile above.
The severing of the pipe marks a “significant step forward at this point” but the cut wasn’t as smooth as originally hoped, said U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the point person in the response to the spill, at a news conference.
This could mean it could be more challenging to capture the oil, Allen said. A containment cap will be fitted over the pipe and sealed in the next few hours but it’s too early to say how much of the oil can be captured, Allen said.
BP hit a roadblock Wednesday in its latest attempt to contain the spill when a diamond-wire saw making a fine cut got stuck in the pipe. The company managed to dislodge the saw late in the day but workers decided to complete the second cut using shears. A fine cut using the specialized saw would have allowed for a better seal than the rough cut created by the shears.
Since it won’t be a perfect seal, there is a chance that some oil will continue to seep out even once the containment device is in place, Allen said. However, Allen described the cap they plan to use as “one step” back from the best for which they could have hoped. It still has a rubber seal, it just won’t be quite a perpendicular fit, he said. There are other devices stored on the sea floor just in case. He noted that authorities intend to treat the oil that escapes using subsea dispersants.
“We could be lucky and there could be close to none or there could be some,” he said. “I don’t think we know until we actually see how the seal fits with the more jagged cut out there than what we anticipated with the fine cut.”
The Macondo Well owned by BP has been spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico for six weeks, threatening to cause massive ecological and economic damage to the U.S. Gulf Coast. BP and the U.S. government have come under increasing criticism for their inability to stop or contain the leak, which has become the worst oil spill in U.S. history.