End of Gulf oil leak appears to be in sight

August 5, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS

In the end, it was a crush of mud that finally plugged the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico, three months after the offshore-drilling-rig explosion that unleashed a gusher of oil and a summer of misery along the Gulf Coast.

The government stopped just short of pronouncing the well dead, cautioning that cement and mud must still be pumped in from the bottom to seal it off for good.

President Barack Obama declared that the battle to contain one of the world’s worst oil spills is “finally close to coming to an end.”

Yet after months of living with lost income, fouled shorelines and dying wildlife, some Gulf Coast residents weren’t so sure.

“I don’t think we’ve finished with this,” said 59-year-old Harry “Cho-cho” Cheramie, who grew up in Grand Isle, La. “We haven’t really started to deal with it yet. We don’t know what effect it’s going to have on our seafood in the long run.”

Still, it appeared there might finally be an end in sight to the disaster that closed vast stretches of fishing areas, interrupted the usually lucrative tourist season, and cost BP’s CEO his job and the company’s shareholders millions of dollars.

BP PLC said 2,300 barrels of mud forced down the well overnight had pushed the crude back down to its source for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded off Louisiana on April 20, killing 11 workers and sending tar balls washing onto beaches and oil oozing into delicate coastal marshes.

Wednesday night, National Incident Commander Thad Allen said he approved BP’s plan to begin forcing cement down the well, as long as it didn’t delay work on the relief well. BP officials said they planned to begin pumping cement today.

And there was more seemingly good news: A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report released Wednesday claimed that only about a quarter of the spilled oil remains in the Gulf and is degrading quickly. The rest has been contained or cleaned up or otherwise disappeared, and the report also said the oil no longer poses a threat to the Florida Keys or the East Coast.

NOAA said nearly 70 percent of the oil from the well dissolved naturally or was burned, skimmed, dispersed and captured. But independent experts say it’s an overly optimistic assessment and that the report contains more spin than science.

But the containment effort — and the cleanup — aren’t finished. Crews that forced in the mud for the “static kill” now must decide whether to follow up by pumping cement down the broken wellhead.

Federal officials said they won’t declare complete victory until they pump in mud and cement from the bottom to seal the well, a procedure that might not be done for weeks.