Legal Commentary

BP Caps Oil Well, Obama Heads Back to Gulf Coast

By Jeralyn

BP capped the leaking oil well with a containment device referred to as "Top Hat.

BP engineers Thursday night guided a containment dome onto the hydrocarbon geyser shooting from the Gulf of Mexico oil well -- a desperate and iffy attempt to capture the leaking oil and funnel it to a ship on the surface.

...It was not an elegant operation. Furious clouds of oil escaped the "top hat." Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the spill, called the development a positive step but said, "It will be sometime before we can confirm that this method will work and to what extent it will mitigate the release of oil into the environment."

[More...]

Six weeks to the day after Deepwater Horizon sank, and five days after BP and the government gave up hope for killing the well with blasts of drilling mud, the top hat offered the best chance so far of capturing the leaking oil before it can pollute the gulf further.

President Obama has canceled a trip to Asia and will fly back to Lousiana and the Gulf Coast today.

Mr. Obama is pretty much in a no-win situation right now on going to the Gulf. If he heads down there once a week, he'll be called a media wh*re. If he stays away to let people do their work, critics will call him insensitive and detached.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 04, 2010 (boomark / email).