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United States News Title: President To Illustrate Scale Of Oil Disaster With First Oval Office Address President Barack Obama will tomorrow night make his first address to the American people from the Oval Office, underlining the scale of the catastrophe now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico and vowing to hold BP to account for the environmental damage wrought by its eight-week-old oil spill. His prime-time broadcast comes at the start of a crucial week in the response to the crisis. Senior politicians from the Obama administration and the Democratic hierarchy in Congress are lining up to step up the pressure on BP amid accusations that the disaster is spinning out of control. Obama is expected to use his Oval Office speech to outline plans to force the oil giant to set up an independently monitored multibillion-dollar fund to compensate victims of the spill. He will also lay out a detailed timeline of how the worst of the calamity could be contained. The president began his new offensive today with a two-day visit to the stricken Gulf region. As he landed in Gulfport, Mississippi, he deployed the sharpest language available to him: he likened the environmental impact of the Deep Horizon explosion to the impact on the national psyche of 9/11. In an interview with the website Politico, he said: "In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come." He added that the disaster would act as an impetus "to move forward in a bold way in a direction that finally gives us the kind of future-oriented, visionary energy policy that we so vitally need and that has been absent for so long". Obama's comparison of the impact of the oil spill on the environmental debate to the foreign policy impact of 9/11 drew some angry responses from families of the 11 September attacks. Jim Riches, former deputy chief of New York's fire department, whose son died in the World Trade Centre, said: "These were terrorist attacks, not something caused by people trying to make money." Obama's trip to the region was his fourth since the oil well exploded on 20 April, and saw him travel beyond the boundaries of the worst-hit state, Louisiana, for the first time. He was scheduled to take in three states – Mississippi, Alabama and Florida – including his first ride on a boat into the waters of the Gulf, in which he was visiting barrier islands in Alabama that are now coated in glutinous oil. In addition to the Oval Office address, political pressure on BP will be kept at intense levels throughout the week. Hours before the broadcast, the energy and environment sub-committee of the House of Representatives will call senior BP officials in front of it to answer questions on the company's handling of the crisis. Then on Wednesday, Obama will hold his first meeting with a team of top BP staff led by the oil giant's chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, and expected to include Tony Hayward, BP's gaffe-prone chief executive. The following day Hayward is likely to come under even more forensic questioning when he faces a panel of the powerful congressional committee on energy and commerce. The chairman of the committee, Henry Waxman, has given Hayward advance warning of some of the tougher questions he is likely to face. In a 14-page letter, Waxman writes that the committee will want to know why BP took several decisions "for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure" despite having already identified it as a "nightmare well". The letter continues: "In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk." BP has now passed a 72-hour ultimatum set for it by the Obama administration to come up with a more focused plan for how to bring the spill under control. Worst-case scenarios, estimated by US government scientists, suggest that up to 40,000 barrels of oil could be spewing out into the Gulf each day, with only 15,000 barrels currently being collected by a cap placed over the wrecked well. As a first step, BP is in the process of placing sensors into the heart of the leaking well in an effort to gain a more accurate gauge of the rate of spillage. The firm has come under heavy criticism for consistently downplaying the extent of the disaster, and it is hoped the sensors will help to end the controversy. BP engineers are also preparing a new technique known as a "reverse top kill" that is intended to increase the quantities of oil collected by the cap. Should this method work – and all previous attempts at containment have been only partially successful at best – then it could gather an extra 5,000 to 10,000 barrels a day. Even where the oil has been captured, BP has struggled to deal with it owing to an insufficient capacity in specialised ships at the surface. The Obama administration has read the riot act to the company, demanding that as many ships are brought to the location of the broken rig as are needed to get the job done. To increase its ability to cope with oil siphoned from the well, BP has installed a new system of pipes that will allow the flow to go to a series of different ships, raising capacity. But the "floating risers", as they are called, will not be in place until the end of this month at the earliest.
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#2. To: Brian S (#0)
Jesus H. Christ...
Its doubtful this leak will be stopped before the end of the year, Freddie.
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