'Top kill' Appears To Have Halted Flow In Gulf, According To Coast Guard

chicagotribune.com:

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.

Read the whole story: chicagotribune.com

Comments

[techcafe]

07:15 PM on 05/27/2010

given that the petroleum industry did not have a contingency PLAN for capping a catastrophic underwater blowouts, nor effective methods of containment/recovery of the oil, nor any means to prevent the devastating impact on our marine environment - i sincerely hope we seize this moment to drag our government into THIS century and start crafting SENSIBLE energy policy.

[techcafe]

06:40 PM on 05/27/2010

i'll believe the 'hole is plugged' when i SEE that there are no more hydrocarbons and drilling fluids spewing out of the blowout preventor and riser pipe.

[Adam Purnell]

03:55 PM on 05/27/2010

Well done BP and its associates for this engineering marvel.
This achievement should be lauded to the maximum.
I just pray that nothing on this scale ever happens again in the increasingly desperate quest to satisfy the world's unquenchable thirst for oil.

Thank God it's all over!

[techcafe]

06:29 PM on 05/27/2010

"Thank God it's all over!"

is that supposed to be a joke?
the catastrophic impact of this environmental crime will be felt along the Gulf coast for DECADES

[bobdob]

02:00 PM on 05/27/2010

This is just a reprinting of the Jim Tankersley story in the LA Times story. And the LA Times has updated their story to reflect the facts.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-top-kill-20100528,0,5782115.story

[had-enough]

12:43 PM on 05/27/2010

Let's let Tony Hayward diver into the water and testg how deep the sludge goes!

[HPLeft]

11:56 AM on 05/27/2010

We can only hope.

[PaganCanuck]

11:50 AM on 05/27/2010

I'm looking at the latest feed, and while I do admit it kind of looks different than the oil, I wonder why part of the gusher is much lighter than the rest. If it's just mud now, should it not be all the same?

It looks just like the gas/oil split like before.

[techcafe]

06:22 PM on 05/27/2010

drilling 'mud' is actually a misnomer; it's actually 'drilling fluid' or 'mud' in driller's parlance... and not nearly as inocuous as it sounds:

Drilling muds are used for the lubrication and cooling of the drill bit and pipe. The muds also remove the cuttings that come from the bottom of the oil well and help prevent blowouts by acting as a sealant. There are different types of drilling muds used in oil drilling operations, but all release toxic chemicals that can affect marine life. One drilling platform normally drills between seventy and one hundred wells and discharges more than 90,000 metric tons of drilling fluids and metal cuttings into the ocean.
---
read more:
http://na.oceana.org/en/our-work/stop-ocean-pollution/oil-pollution/learn-act/impacts-of-offshore-drilling

[techcafe]

06:27 PM on 05/27/2010

"all (drilling muds/fluids) release toxic chemicals that can affect marine life."

"ONE drilling platform normally drills between seventy and one hundred wells, then discharges more than 90,000 metric tons of these toxic drilling fluids and metal cuttings into the ocean."

[me1cagen]

11:17 AM on 05/27/2010

This is far and away the biggest news story right now, and I had to look for it here...Birnbaum and others will be fired, that's how this works, but in the meantime there is good news to report...and it is buried with a handful of comments....what a neagative piece of dump this place has become

[breathestolive]

11:07 AM on 05/27/2010

A) This is not a "spill". It's a spew, and it's been going on for nearly a month and a half.

B) It's high time they got this done, now that millions and millions of barrels of oil have spewed into the Gulf.

This cannot help but affect wildlife and the quality of life of all living things for decades to come.

[PaganCanuck]

11:00 AM on 05/27/2010

I'd like to see some non-BP verification on this. It's pretty convenient that they can claim the pipes that are still gushing on the live feed are just spewing mud now. There is no way to know how much of their claims are true.

[merrylander]

10:53 AM on 05/27/2010

So why, again, wasn't this done weeks ago??

[wrb]

12:13 PM on 05/27/2010

1) it wasn't thought possible until Steven Wu's gamma ray imaging showed that the blow out preventer was sufficiently intact and sufficiently constricted for it to work. So perhaps Obama's guy really did save the day.

There was a huge amount of prep work to be done 5000' under the ocean, including rebuilding and modifying part of the BOP. Normally this work would have taken months.

This describes what was done and includes some great graphics.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6505

[getoffmedz]

10:35 AM on 05/27/2010

For how long?

A: A day or two.

[Smirk]

10:27 AM on 05/27/2010

I certainly hope so!