'Top kill' fails; BP will try new containment approach

It is the well that will not die.

BP's effort to throttle the leaking Gulf of Mexico oil well with multiple blasts of heavy mud has failed. The attempted "top kill" was abandoned Saturday afternoon, leaving the well free to pump at least half a million gallons of crude a day into the Gulf.

"I can say we tried. But what I can also say is this scares everybody, the fact that we can't make this well stop flowing," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said at a news conference.

"There's no silver bullet to stop this leak," Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said.

The top kill — a term most Americans had never heard until it became part of the new national vocabulary along with "blowout preventer," "containment dome" and "junk shot" — had been seen as the best hope for turning the oil spill into something finite in volume. Now BP must fall back on a containment strategy in the near term, hoping to capture as much oil as possible.

The decision to abandon the top kill was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in attempts to repair the blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when the dome became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Attempts to use a hose to gather escaping oil managed to catch only a tiny fraction of the total spill.

Sitting on the seafloor and awaiting deployment is a new containment dome, what the company calls the Lower Marine Riser Package cap.

With robotic submarines, the company will sever the leaking, kinked riser pipe that emerges from the top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-tall contraption on top of the wellhead. Then engineers will guide the cap onto the pipe.

The cap is fitted with a grommet designed to keep out seawater and prevent the formation of slushy methane hydrates that bedeviled the earlier containment-dome effort. The cap procedure will take four to seven days, officials say.

"This operation should be able to capture most of the oil," Suttles said. "I want to stress the word 'most,' because it's not a tight, mechanical seal."

After that, the company could place another blowout preventer on top of the existing one. Meanwhile, two drilling rigs at the surface continue to drill relief wells. That's a long-term strategy that requires engineers to hit a 7-inch target, the bottom of the leaking well, 3 1/2 miles below the surface of the Gulf. The first of the two wells to hit the target will send a massive dose of cement to seal the leaking well.

That will not be until August, Suttles said.

The oil gusher began after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in April, killing 11 people.

News of the latest setback was not a shock, given the doubts expressed by engineers and BP about whether it's possible to kill a well 5,000 feet below the surface and accessible only with robotic vehicles. Suttles said the top-kill operation had pumped 30,000 tons of mud into the well without stopping the oil.

President Obama called the latest failure "as enraging as it is heartbreaking."

"As I said yesterday, every day that this leak continues is an assault on the people of the Gulf Coast region, their livelihoods, and the natural bounty that belongs to all of us," Obama said.

Energy analyst Byron King, meanwhile, moaned, "This well is evil."

As it became apparent Saturday that the top kill would not work, Gulf Coast residents took stock of the demoralizing situation.

"We're in for a tough time now," said Ed Overton, an environmental-science professor at Louisiana State University, noting that one saving grace of the spill — its relatively slow progress toward the coast — will soon expire as more and more of the dark slick reaches shore.

Despite BP's and the government's claims of a massive defense effort, far more resources will be required to deal with the coming slick, Overton said.

"We've got to get more vessels. We don't need 1,300, we need 10,000," Overton said. "Now's the time to stop being optimistic and get the assets out there."

Wayne Landry, council president in St. Bernard Parish, said Saturday that local communities are going to take a more aggressive and independent approach to fighting the effects of the spill rather than rely on BP or the federal government. He and other leaders from parishes and counties in Louisiana and Mississippi have organized their own response, what they call the "coastal zone authority for recovery."

He lashed out at BP's decision to use dispersants that Landry believes have undermined the miles of boom laid out to stop oil on the surface.

"Let's start getting at some of the hard, hurtful truths. We don't know what we're dealing with," Landry said.

Material from The Associated Press and The New York Times is included in this report.