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Box to contain oil reaches Gulf floor

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The Associated Press

A BP-chartered vessel lowered a 100-ton concrete-and-steel

vault onto a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, an
important step in a delicate and unprecedented attempt to stop
most of the gushing crude fouling the sea.

Underwater robots guided the 40-foot-tall box into place. Now

that the contraption is on the seafloor, workers will need at least
12 hours to let it settle and make sure it's stable before the
robots can hook up a pipe and hose that will funnel the oil up to
Enlarge By Gerald Herbert, AP a tanker.

Workers eased a 100-ton concrete-and-steel

containment vessel into the Gulf of Mexico. The vessel "It appears to be going exactly as we hoped," BP spokesman Bill
is designed to collect as much as 85% of the oil Salvin told The Associated Press on Friday afternoon, shortly
spewing into the Gulf and funnel it up to a tanker. after the four-story device hit the seafloor. "Still lots of
challenges ahead, but this is very good progress."

BACKGROUND: Robots position giant box over oil-spewing

5 CONTAINMENT EFFORTS well
MIGHTY MISS.: River to help in oil-spill fight
CLEANUP: Containment effort's success hard to gauge

By Sunday, the box the size of a house could be capturing up to

85% of the oil. So far about 3 million gallons have leaked in an environmental crisis that has been unfolding since a
deepwater drilling platform exploded April 20, sending toxic oil toward a shoreline of marshes, shipping channels,
fishing grounds and beaches. Eleven workers were killed in the accident.

The lowering of the containment device was a slow-moving drama playing out 50 miles from Louisiana's coast,
requiring great precision and attention to detail. It took about two weeks to build the 40-foot box, and the effort to
lower it by crane and cable to the seafloor began late Thursday night. After it hit bottom Friday afternoon, the crane
gradually eased off to allow it to settle.

"We are essentially taking a four-story building and lowering it 5,000 feet and setting it on the head of a pin," Salvin
said.

The task became increasingly urgent as toxic oil crept deeper into the bays and marshes of the Mississippi Delta.

A sheen of oil began arriving on land last week, and crews have been putting out floating barriers, spraying
chemical dispersants and setting fire to the slick to try to keep it from coming ashore. But now the thicker, stickier
goo arrayed in vivid, brick-colored ribbons is drawing ever closer to Louisiana's coastal communities.

There are still untold risks and unknowns with the containment box: The approach has never been tried at such
depths, where the water pressure is enough to crush a submarine, and any wrong move could damage the leaking
pipe and make the problem worse. The seafloor is pitch black and the water murky, though lights on the robots
illuminate the area where they are working.

If the box works, another one will be dropped onto a second, smaller leak at the bottom of the Gulf.

At the same time, crews are drilling sideways into the well in hopes of plugging it up with mud and concrete, and
they are working on other ways to cap it.

The well has been spewing about 200,000 gallons a day in the nation's biggest oil spill since the nearly 11 million
gallons lost in the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989.

The cause of the blast has not been determined, but investigators have been focusing on the so-called blowout
preventer. Federal regulators told The Associated Press that they are going to examine whether these last-resort
cutoff valves on offshore oil wells are reliable.

At Hopedale, a fishing community in St. Bernard Parish, La., that has been a staging area for efforts to protect
inlets and bayous, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal stepped out of a helicopter and held aloft a tennis ball-size hunk of
tarry oil he said a fisherman had retrieved near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Oil was reported moving west of the Mississippi toward fishing and resort villages on the Louisiana coast.

After a flyover, Jindal described the orange and brown goo surrounding Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands as
resembling "a ring around your bathtub."

Several members of Congress flew over the spill and then visited Hopedale on Friday as well.

U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, said hearings on
the explosion will start next week.

"Lives were lost, livelihoods ruined," Markey said. "The lessons that will be learned will become laws."

BP plans to sell the petroleum it recovers after separating out the large amounts of natural gas and seawater
something that industry experts said should not present much of a problem.

"That's something they do for every oil well," said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geoscience
programs at the University of Houston. "They'll refine it and crack it and everything, and by the time it gets in your
gas tank, you'll never even know it was in the water."

The oil's planned destination, BP's Texas City, Texas, refinery, has its own checkered history. An explosion there
in 2005 killed 15 people and injured 170. Regulators last October hit BP with a record $87 million fine for safety
violations.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten
or redistributed.

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