Monday, November 29, 1999

Weather aids U.S. oil slick fight; current feared

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A flotilla of nearly 200 boats tackled a massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, taking advantage of calm weather to intensify containment efforts while a scientist warned that a powerful current could carry the crude to Miami and points beyond.Cleanup crews waiting on shore along the U.S. Gulf got a few days reprieve as the slow-moving slick remained parked in the Gulf waters that are calm, for now."Right now, we're not showing shoreline impact for three days," BP Plc Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said.BP, under heavy pressure in Washington since a deadly April 20 rig explosion triggered the breach in its deep-water well, hurried efforts toward plugging a gushing undersea leak that threatens coastal fishing and tourism and is reshaping the U.S. political debate on offshore drilling.It expects a giant steel containment device, fabricated in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, and designed to be placed over the biggest of three oil well leaks on the seabed, to leave port on Wednesday and be operating in the next six days.The Mississippi River delta and other areas of the U.S. Gulf Coast are threatened by the leak, spewing oil from the ocean floor at a rate estimated at more than 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 litres) a day.Calmer seas after days of high winds aided one of the biggest oil-containment operations ever attempted.Boats were laying down and repairing miles of boom lines strung along Gulf shores to try to fend off and contain the drifting slick estimated to be at least 130 miles (208 kilometres) by 70 miles (112 km) in size."With the conditions turning better and better, it's encouraging," Coast Guard Petty Officer Matthew Schofield said from the Joint Information Center in Roberts, Louisiana. "There have been no reports of thick oil on shore."Still, environmental regulators reported a "first sighting" of slick near the Chandeleur Islands, three narrow islands off the southeast coast of Louisiana, on Tuesday.Local officials worried that yet another potential swing in wind direction that could threaten the Chandeleurs.CURRENT WORRIESIt is a race against time. If the slick contacts the so-called Loop sea current, the oily sheen could eventually be carried to Miami in south Florida or even as far as North Carolina's barrier islands, Robert Weisberg, a physical oceanographer at the University of South Florida, warned."Exactly when the oil will enter the Loop Current at the surface is unknown but it appears to be imminent," Weisberg said, referring to the prevailing current in the Gulf.Asked about the possibility, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the agency had no forecast of this in its 72-hour projection forecast window.No oil has floated there yet, but business owners in Pensacola Beach, the Florida Panhandle vacation mecca boasting "the world's whitest beaches", are already feeling the impact as cancellations flow into hotels and time shares.In addition to BP's stopgap measure of the containment chamber, drilling started Sunday on a relief well that could cap the oil spill on the Gulf floor, but the operation is expected to take two to three months to complete.Lawmakers and the White House vowed to change a law limiting BP's liability for lost revenues from fishing, tourism and other businesses to $10 billion from $75 million.Those payments would be aside from the total spill clean-up costs, which analysts estimate at $14 billion or more."The administration is working on legislation to lift that cap and extend it ... we could easily top $75 million in a short period of time," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.Those whose livelihoods depend on a healthy Gulf environment are bracing for a heavy toll."Our biggest concern is that the oil comes in in any kind of volume and settles in the cane. Once it settles it destroys the cane and kills the shrimp," charter boat captain Dan Dix said in Venice, Louisiana."If you kill the shrimp, you kill the fish that feed off the shrimp, and if you kill the fish then there is nothing left in the Gulf of Mexico. That would absolutely be a disaster for years and years," he said.U.S. oil prices tumbled 4 percent to $82.74 a barrel on Tuesday, as traders downplayed the threat to production and shipping in the Gulf. BP shares also showed signs of stabilization after a 17 percent slid in the two weeks since the blast at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.It subsequently sank, killing 11 workers and unleashing the oil flow into the sea.DRILLING DEBATE SPREADSThe leak, still weeks or months away from being stopped, threatens to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe in Alaska, the worst previous U.S. oil spill to date.Like the oil spewing into the Gulf, the political debate over the environmental impact of offshore drilling went on unchecked. Mary Landrieu, Democratic Senator from Louisiana, shot back at critics calling for the shutdown of drilling, a main industry in her state."They are absolutely wrong," she told CNN. Ending drilling is "not going to do anything to clean our environment, it's not going to do anything to create jobs -- it will lose jobs -- and it is not going to do anything to make America safe and energy-independent, and those are the three things we need to do."The spill forced President Barack Obama to suspend plans to expand offshore oil drilling, unveiled last month partly to woo Republican support for climate legislation.Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, a fierce opponent of offshore drilling because of the environmental risks it entails, said the expanded drilling proposals were "dead on arrival" in Congress.But the governors of Texas and Mississippi warned against a rush to judgment.(Additional reporting by Matt Daily in New York and Tom Bergin in London; Anna Driver and Chris Baltimore in Houston; Pascal Fletcher in Miami; Michael Peltier in Pensacola; and Ricard Cowan in Washington; Writing by Jeffrey Jones, John Whitesides and Ros Krasny; Editing by Philip Barbara)

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