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Title: Oil Spill Workers Prepare To Evacuate As Storm Approaches Gulf of Mexico
Source:
WP
URL Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy ... 010072201409.html?hpid=topnews
Published: Jul 22, 2010
Author: Steven Mufson and Marc Kaufman
Post Date: 2010-07-22 12:18:45 by Brian S
Keywords: None
Views: 899
Comments: 1
With weather conditions deteriorating in the eastern Caribbean, crews on dozens of ships around the blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico were preparing to evacuate Thursday, having stopped work on efforts to finally kill the well and installed a plug to protect the relief well they are building from storm-roughened seas. Forecasters said Wednesday that there's a 50 percent chance of a tropical depression or storm in the area within the next 48 hours. BP Senior Vice President Kent Wells said that although boats and crew remain at the Macondo site, work on the relief well was stopped Wednesday to give hundreds of workers time to leave. Evolving plans for an additional effort to seal the well from above were put on hold. "We could have a tropical storm at Macondo," Wells said, "and we have to be able to get out of the way. We have to watch the weather very, very carefully and adjust plans accordingly." Anxiety built Thursday among the 75-member crew aboard the cutter Decisive, the Coast Guard's primary search and rescue vessel that would be the last of about 65 ships to leave in the event of an evacuation, the Associated Press reported. "It's a controlled chaos out there," Lt. Patrick Montgomery told an AP reporter aboard the cutter heading from Pascagoula, Miss., to the spill site. The Shell Oil Co. announced Wednesday that it was preparing to take all non-essential personnel off its platforms and rigs in the eastern gulf as a precaution. Spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh said the move was triggered by the possibility of bad weather rather than any clear threat. BP spokesman Daren Beaudo said his company was watching the weather but had not yet decided on any evacuation. If the weather forces workers to leave the leak site, the final sealing of the well could be delayed 10 to 14 days, National Incident Commander Thad Allen said Wednesday. Since a new containment cap was installed last week, the well has been plugged and the oil and gas geyser controlled. BP officials said they were confident the well as currently configured would hold up during a storm. Crews had planned to spend Wednesday and Thursday reinforcing with cement the last few feet of the relief tunnel that will be used to pump mud into the gusher, before launching the final effort to kill the well. But BP put the task on hold and instead placed a temporary plug called a storm packer deep inside the tunnel, in case the tunnel has to be abandoned until the storm passes. The plug was installed about 300 feet below the seafloor, beneath the well's blowout preventer. Also Wednesday, four oil giants announced plans to spend $1 billion to jointly design, manufacture and store equipment to respond to any future oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, part of an effort to bolster their capabilities in the wake of the BP disaster and to reassure Congress members worried about future drilling. Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron announced Wednesday a plan to form a nonprofit, the Marine Well Containment Co., and to prepare equipment similar to what BP began to design and assemble only after the April 20 explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and triggered the massive oil spill in the gulf. Exxon Mobil will lead the engineering and construction efforts, which the companies said they hoped to complete in 18 months. The new response plan focuses on how to quickly stop the flow of oil from a leaking, subsea well and how to channel the oil to vessels nearby. It does not include new measures for how to skim oil from water or to clean soiled shorelines. The companies said that the plan will include a containment cap similar to the one now on top of BP's damaged Macondo well. It will also include specially designed subsea manifolds, flexible riser pipes to link a damaged well to the water surface, and ships capable of capturing and storing the oil. At the Macondo site itself, Allen said, efforts to collect oil from the water surface appear to be successful. "We're really having to search for the oil in some cases," he said. "We've had skimmers out there on the wellhead site for a number of days now, as many as 50 a day." 
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
Dry run for the CAT 3/5 late August/early September.
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