A storm system moved toward the Gulf of Mexico oil spill area yesterday, forcing response crews to head inland for safety and halting work to plug the ruptured BP well.
Tropical depression Bonnie sent crews packing aboard 11 offshore platforms, a container ship and two rigs, as the evacuation also suspended at least 28 percent of Gulf oil production.
Officials said a cap that has kept oil from escaping the blown out BP well since last Thursday would stay in place, after a week of tests suggested pressure would not force oil out through new leaks.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Thad Allen, the US official overseeing the spill response, said the evacuation would set back efforts to finally “kill” the leaking well by several days, and could leave the cap unmonitored until the storm passes.
With the safety of workers at the well site a top concern, Allen said the rough weather had forced crews to collect boom and return ships to shore and some of the 2,000-strong crew responding to the spill headed back to land.
“The intention right now is to put the vessels in a safe place so they can return as quickly as possible to resume their operations,” he told reporters.
He said officials estimated that “if we abandon the scene, it would be 48 hours before we would be back on.”
The oncoming storm has forced a halt to the process of concreting the casing on the first of two relief wells.
Once concrete can be set, a process expected to take two days, officials hope to perform a “static kill” to plug the well by injecting heavy drilling mud and cement through the cap at the top.
The final operation to cement the reservoir through a relief well will take another week, Allen said.
Crews began preparing for the storm on Thursday, after forecasters said Bonnie could affect the entire northern Gulf Coast.
Bonnie struck south Florida as a tropical storm early on Friday, weakening into a tropical depression before it headed out over the Gulf, where the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecast it would strengthen again.
The center of the depression was about 135km southwest of Sarasota, Florida, early yesterday, the center said. While not expected to grow into a hurricane, Bonnie has renewed concern about severe storms hampering oil clean-up operations and worsening conditions along the coast, where 1,012km of shoreline have been oiled across all five US states on Gulf Coast.
The NHC predicted Bonnie would hit the northern Gulf Coast late yesterday, raising water levels by up to 1.5m above ground level.
Allen said the storm might be mild enough to allow some vessels to remain at the well site.
“The seismic survey vessels, the acoustic vessels and the vessels operating the ROVs [underwater robots] will stay as long as possible, and if conditions allow it they will remain through the passage of the storm,” he said.
But if the ships are forced to depart, engineers will have no real-time information about the state of the wellbore below the sealing cap.
Hydrophones will take recordings, but Allen said the information could only be analyzed after the fact.
Separately, a former rig worker told federal investigators that an alarm that should have alerted Deepwater Horizon workers to a deadly build-up of gas had been muted months before the April 20 explosion that sank the rig.
The system, which uses lights and alarms to warn of fire or high levels of toxic or explosive gases, had been “inhibited,” Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the rig, told a hearing looking into the disaster.
Rig owner Transocean sought to rebut Williams’s testimony, insisting the configuration was “intentional” and conformed to maritime practice.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this