Thread: Coast Guard to try burning oil slick off Louisiana coast~

Water or Air? Which is the lesser of the two evils here? Apparently the air has won out.

(CNN) -- The U.S. Coast Guard prepared to set fire Wednesday to portions of a growing oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico to keep the pool of crude away from sensitive ecological areas in the Mississippi River Delta.

Efforts to cap the well that was opened up last week when the Deepwater Horizon drill rig blew up and sank off Louisiana have been unsuccessful.

Eleven workers are still missing after the explosion; another 115 people were rescued.

Northwesterly winds drove the 80-mile-long slick back from Louisiana's coast slightly Wednesday, and the Coast Guard planned to ignite a portion of the spilled oil sometime after 11 a.m. CT (noon ET).

"It's a historically proven technique, and it has multiple preventative safety measures in place to ensure that that burn area remains controlled," said Lt. Cmdr. Matt Moorlag, a Coast Guard spokesman.

The oil will be corralled by a specially designed boom before being set ablaze. The flames are expected to destroy between 50 percent to 90 percent of the section, and winds should blow the resulting cloud of smoke and soot out to sea, Moorlag said.

"We shouldn't see any shoreline that sees that smoke," he said.

The oil spill has the potential to become one of worst in U.S. history, Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landrey said Tuesday. The well, about 50 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River, is dumping about 42,000 gallons a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

Connect the World blog: Should there be a full ban on off-shore drilling?

BP, the well's owner, has been trying to shut off the flow using eight remote-controlled submarines, but it has had no luck up to this point.

The spill, measured from end to end, stretched as wide as 42 miles by 80 miles, although oil isn't necessarily covering that entire area. Most of the slick is a thin sheen on the water's surface, ranging in thickness from a couple of molecules to the equivalent of a layer of paint. About 3 percent of it is a heavy, puddinglike crude oil.

The slick was about 23 miles off the Louisiana coast Wednesday morning, leaving many who draw their living from the water and coastal wetlands "watching and praying," said Tony Fernandez, owner of the Breton Sound Marina near Hopedale, Louisiana.

"For the most part, what we're doing is mostly waiting," Fernandez said. "There's not much that laypeople can do with this."

People in the area are closely watching the Coast Guard plans to burn off portions of the slick, he said.

At its current flow rate, it would take more than 260 days to rival the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, which discharged some 11 million gallons into Alaska's Price William Sound. Still, even if it never compares in size to the Exxon Valdez spill, if it makes landfall it could have serious ecological repercussions.

The Coast Guard, BP and the rig's owner, Transocean, have deployed nearly 50 vessels to help contain and clean the slick.

Marine life has been spotted in the area. Over the weekend, a plane from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sighted five small whales nearby.

Efforts are also under way near the shoreline to deal with the spill should it reach land, including positioning boom material around sensitive ecological areas.

Five staging areas have been set up on land, stretching from Venice, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Florida.

Landry said Tuesday the slick should remain at sea until at least Friday, although weather reports for the latter part of that period suggest the wind could shift and blow the slick toward land.

The oil, if it stays at sea, eventually will evaporate, break down and sink, or get cleaned up.

The leak appears to be coming from a pipe that ran from the well head to the drilling rig, which is now upside down in 5,000 feet of water.

It has not been decided if the rig will be salvaged or remain where it is, a Transocean official said this week.

To seal the leak, three approaches are being tried.

BP is using remote-controlled submarines to activate the well's blowout preventer, a steel device the size of a small house that sits atop the well and is intended to choke off the flow of oil in the event of a disaster. It's not clear why that device didn't originally act to cap the well, or if it will be of any use in the future.

BP also is bringing in another drilling rig that could seal the well, but that effort would take months, according to a company spokesman.

In the meantime, BP also is trying a novel approach to capture the oil -- using a dome right above the well head. The dome resembles an inverted funnel, with a pipe leading up to ships waiting at the surface to capture the oil. That tactic has never been tried in deep water before.

A BP spokesman said the dome should be ready in two to four weeks.

Coast Guard to try burning oil slick off Louisiana coast - CNN.com

Originally Posted by chassisman

I have to wonder if sabotage was involved.

Eh, I'd wait for some kind of preliminary report before I'd say that. Accidents like that rarely happen because of all the safety measures in place (which is why it has to be a pretty long chain of bad events), but they DO happen. And BP already has a history of disaster. You remember that huge explosion in Texas City that killed 15 people? You guessed it-it was a BP plant.