Obama is Confident

Admiral Allen yesterday told reporters a cap on the damaged oil well is keeping up to 462,000 gallons of oil a day from leaking into the Gulf. That's up from about 441,000 gallons on Saturday and about 250,000 on Friday.

BP in a statement put the amount being captured at 466,200 gallons. Admiral Allen said the government was using its own flow-rate calculations and not relying on those from BP.
"This will be contained," Mr. Obama asserted. "It may take some time, and it's going to take a whole lot of effort. There is going to be damage done to the Gulf Coast, and there is going to be economic damages that we've got to make sure BP is responsible for and compensates people for."
Mr. Obama said that government scientists and other experts confirmed that the capping device "is beginning to capture some of the oil. We are still trying to make a better determination as to how much it is capturing."
But, he added, "even if we are successful in containing some or much of the oil" the problem wouldn't be solved until relief wells reach the area of the damaged well in several months.
"What is clear is that the economic impact of this disaster is going to be substantial and it is going to be ongoing," he said.
"We also know that there's already a lot of oil that's been released and that there's going to be more oil released no matter how successful this containment effort is," he added.
He reiterated an appeal he made on Friday in the region that BP not "nickel and dime" Gulf coast residents and businesses that have filed claims against the London-based oil giant.
"'We are going to insist that money flow quickly and in a timely basis," Mr. Obama said.
Admiral Allen acknowledged at yesterday's White House briefing that the company has struggled with handling claims. He said we'd "like them to get better" at processing the claims and that a system for paying them should be "routinized" as soon as possible.

Govt. wasnt trained for this

A Coast Guard official said that the BP spill has broken up into something the government had not trained for: numerous tiny spills, which are still outflanking cleanup crews across hundreds of miles of coastline.
President Obama said yesterday he's been talking closely to Gulf Coast fishermen and various experts on BP's catastrophic oil spill not for lofty academic reasons but "so I know whose ass to kick."

The salty words, part of Mr. Obama's recent efforts to telegraph to Americans his engagement with the crisis, came in an interview in Michigan with NBC's Today show.
He strongly defended his role in dealing with the crisis that began with the April 20 explosion on a BP-leased oil rig in the Gulf, killing 11 workers and starting the nation's largest-ever oil spill.
"I was down there a month ago before most of these talking heads were even paying attention to the gulf," he told NBC's Matt Lauer. "I was meeting with fishermen in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be."
NBC aired a portion of the interview yesterday evening in advance of today's Today program.
Some have criticized the President for not engaging passionately enough on the spill.
Earlier yesterday, he sought to reassure the nation that the Gulf Coast would "bounce back" from the worst oil spill in the nation's history, but not without time, effort, and reimbursement from BP.
Surrounded by Cabinet members, he said that not only is he confident the crisis will pass but also that the affected area "comes back even stronger than ever."
He and top federal officials were briefed on the government's battle against the spill by Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is overseeing the government's efforts in dealing with the tragedy.

The cap over Spill is capturing oil!!!!!

Forty-nine days later, the Gulf of Mexico got a bit of good news.

Yesterday, U.S. officials said that a "cap" installed over a leaking oil pipe was capturing more than 460,000 gallons (or 11,000 barrels) of oil per day. Instead of spilling into the Gulf, the oil was being funneled up through pipe to a ship on the surface.
The spill isn't over: Large amounts of oil - nobody knows how much - still billow out of vents in the cap. But for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, humans seemed to be partly in control of the leaking BP well, instead of the other way around.
"We only define success as when we actually get the oil plugged ... and we return people's lives back to normal," said Kent Wells, a senior vice president at BP. "But this is an encouraging step."
On the same day, there were signs of how much trouble remains.

Answer to Protection Plan??

So far, no oil is in Weeks Bay or either river, but the slick hasn't gotten to the barrier yet. If and when it does, Hinton and the mayor will make the decision to close the bay and block off access to the Magnolia River.
"We can shut it down in three hours," Hinton said.
Why did it take so long for Hinton to get an answer about the protection plan?
Scott Hughes, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, said the delay sounded like an issue for the unified command in Mobile to address. The head of the command, Coast Guard Capt. Steve Poulin, said it sounded like an issue related to the state's approval process.
Hixon, Hinton's buddy, said the whole system is broken.
"This is the biggest damn mess I've ever seen," he said.
Patricia Sevening, a member of the Magnolia Springs Garden Club who lives on a canal off the Fish River, is just happy someone is protecting her water.
"It's such a beautiful area," said Sevening, watching as boom and barges were moved into place. "This is really frightening, what it could do for generations."

How it all Started?

The story began when Hinton called his local county emergency management office to ask about plans for protecting coastal waters and was shocked by the response.
"The first thing the guy said was, `People are blowing this thing out of proportion, it's just light crude," Hinton said. "I told him I don't care if it's light crude or dark crude or sweet crude, I don't want it in my damn river."
Baldwin County officials deny that anyone ever told Hinton such a thing. But whatever happened, Jamie Hinton was fired up.
Hinton and other leaders got together to kick around ideas for safeguarding their river shortly after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20 and sank in the Gulf of Mexico in about 5,000 feet of water off the Louisiana coast. Someone suggested using barges at the mouth of Weeks Bay to block waves out of the adjoining Mobile Bay, then adding layers of boom.
"It's not rocket science, but it sounded like it might work," Hinton said. The engineering didn't seem that hard since the passage into Weeks Bay is only about 530 feet wide and fairly shallow.
"That protects the Fish River and the Magnolia River. I thought, `that's awesome,'" he said.
Community members honed the plan, and Hinton set out to find barriers to supplement the single strand of narrow boom that BP provided, a meager allocation Hinton called "overly ridiculous." He submitted the blueprint in mid-May believing he'd get an answer quickly from the unified incident command in Mobile.
And then, with the oil oozing toward the northern Gulf Coast, Hinton waited. And waited. And waited.
After fits and starts, supposed approvals and later balks, Hinton finally got the OK last week on his fourth try to protect the river just as oil began washing ashore on Alabama beaches. With a $200,000 allocation from the $25 million that BP gave Alabama for oil spill response, rented barges, a tug and other barriers are now in the water.

Rive Mired in Red Tape

It's hard to imagine a spot with more to lose from the Gulf oil spill than the Magnolia River. Gnarly trees shroud its slow-moving waters, rich with crabs and mullet. Docks have mailboxes; letters are delivered by boat. Seafood boils with friends are a weekend staple.
Jamie Hinton loves this place, just like everyone in this idyllic community off Mobile Bay, and he wants to do all he can to protect it from what he and others see as a twin threat — oil and bumbling on the part of both government leaders and corporate executives.
Hinton, chief of the Magnolia Springs Volunteer Fire Department, said Monday he spent three weeks tangled in red tape before finally getting approval to do something that's never before been needed, much less tried: using a combination of barges and oil-blocking booms to keep crude out of the Magnolia River.
On Sunday, the new system was finally in place at the mouth of Weeks Bay. Locals hope it will safeguard both the Magnolia River and the nearby Fish River, where the U.S. Postal Service operates what locals proudly call the nation's last waterborne mail route.
"What you've got here is a community that has taken charge of the situation and said, `To hell with the system,'" said Gib Hixon, an old friend of Hinton and chief of Fish River/Marlow Fire and Rescue.
"It's illegal to block this waterway. But if the oil comes, we're going to bring a barge in and use it as a gate to block it," said Hixon. "They can arrest me and Jamie if they want to."

Silly but Time-proven

Gerald Wojtala, director of the International Food Protection Training Institute, acknowledged that nosing around seafood may sound silly, but said it's a time-proven technique.
"The human nose has been used on a lot of (oil) spill response," Wojtala said. "There are a lot of sophisticated tests, but when you think about it, do you want to run a test that takes seven days and costs thousands of dollars?
"This saves a lot of time and money," he added, "and it puts more eyes and noses at different points in the system."
Still, Wojtala said, nothing is fail-safe. Even without an oil spill, people sometimes get sick from tainted seafood, or suffer illnesses from contamination in red meat such as E. coli.
"It's safe to say there is no 100-percent guarantee," he said. "There's never a 100-percent guarantee. We can only be as safe as we can be."