The “Top Kill” effort to plug the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico has successfully stopped the flow of oil and gas, a U.S. Coast Guard admiral told the LA Times this morning.
It’s not a sure thing yet — BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production told the New York Times that “it would be a day or more before it was clear whether the top kill had worked,” and neither the government nor BP has made an official declaration — but it sounds encouraging.
The “top kill” effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, had pumped enough drilling fluid to block oil and gas spewing from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well was very low, he said, but persisting.
Once engineers had reduced the well pressure to zero, they were to begin pumping cement into the hole to entomb the well. To help in that effort, he said, engineers also were pumping some debris into the blowout preventer at the top of the well.
As none other than Bill Nye counseled us, as justifiedly harsh as the anger against BP may be for the spill, some of the nation’s top private and public sector engineers have been working their hardest to fix the problem. Let’s hope they’ve found success in the top kill effort and that we can begin on the long road toward repair and recovery.
[LA Times]
