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As BP labored for a second day Thursday to
choke off the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, dire new
government estimates showed the disaster has easily eclipsed the
Exxon Valdez as the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.


      The company announced late in the day that it had suspended
shooting heavy drilling mud into the blown-out well 5,000 feet
underwater around midnight Wednesday so it could bring in more
materials. Thursday evening, BP PLC said it had resumed the pumping
procedure known as a top kill. Officials said it could be late
Friday or the weekend before the company knows if it has cut off
the oil that has been flowing for five weeks.


      As the world waited, President Barack Obama announced major new
restrictions on drilling projects, and the head of the federal
agency that regulates the industry resigned under pressure,
becoming the highest-ranking political casualty of the crisis so
far.


      BP insisted the top kill was progressing as planned, though the
company acknowledged drilling mud was escaping from the broken pipe
along with the leaking crude.


      "The fact that we had a bunch of mud going up the riser isn't
ideal but it's not necessarily indicative of a problem," said
spokesman Tom Mueller.


      Early Thursday, officials said the process was going well, but
later in the day they announced pumping had been suspended 16 hours
earlier.


      The top kill is the latest in a string of attempts to stop the
oil that has been spewing since the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon
exploded April 20. Eleven workers were killed.


      If the procedure works, BP will inject cement into the well to
seal it permanently. If it doesn't, the company has a number of
backup plans. Either way, crews will continue to drill two relief
wells, considered the only surefire way to stop the leak.


      A top kill has never been attempted before so deep underwater.
BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said the company is also
considering shooting small, dense rubber balls or assorted junk
such as golf balls and rubber scraps to stop up a crippled
five-story piece of equipment known as a blowout preventer to keep
the mud from escaping.


      The stakes were higher than ever as public frustration over the
spill grew and a team of government scientists said the oil has
been flowing at a rate 2½ to five times higher than what BP and the
Coast Guard previously estimated.


      Two teams of scientists calculated the well has been spewing
between 504,000 and more than a million gallons a day. Even using
the most conservative estimate, that means about 18 million gallons
have spilled so far. In the worst-case scenario, 39 million gallons
have leaked.


      That larger figure would be nearly four times the size of the
Exxon Valdez disaster, in which a tanker ran aground in Alaska in
1989, spilling nearly 11 million gallons.


      "Now we know the true scale of the monster we are fighting in
the Gulf," said Jeremy Symons, vice president of the National
Wildlife Federation. "BP has unleashed an unstoppable force of
appalling proportions."


      BP spokesman Steve Rinehart said the previous estimate of
210,000 gallons a day was based on the best data available at the
time. As for the new figures, he said: "It does not and will not
change the response. We are going all out on our response."


      The spill is not the biggest ever in the Gulf. In 1979, a
drilling rig in Mexican waters - the Ixtoc I - blew up, releasing
140 million gallons of oil.


      In another troubling discovery, marine scientists said they have
spotted a huge new plume of what they believe to be oil deep
beneath the Gulf, stretching 22 miles from the leaking wellhead
northeast toward Mobile Bay, Ala. They fear it could have resulted
from using chemicals a mile below the surface to break up the oil.


      In Washington, Elizabeth Birnbaum stepped down as director of
the Minerals Management Service, a job she had held since last
July. Her agency has been harshly criticized over lax oversight of
drilling and cozy ties with industry.


      An internal Interior Department report released earlier this
week found that between 2000 and 2008, agency staff members
accepted tickets to sports events, lunches and other gifts from oil
and gas companies and used government computers to view
pornography.


      Polls show the public is souring on the administration's
handling of the catastrophe, and Obama sought to assure Americans
that the government is in control and deflect criticism that his
administration has left BP in charge.


      "My job right now is just to make sure everybody in the Gulf
understands: This is what I wake up to in the morning, and this is
what I go to bed at night thinking about. The spill," he said.


      Obama said he would end the "scandalously close relationship"
between regulators and the oil companies they oversee. He also
extended a freeze on new deepwater oil drilling and canceled or
delayed proposed lease sales in the waters off Alaska and Virginia
and along the Gulf Coast.


      Fishermen, hotel and restaurant owners, politicians and
residents along the 100-mile stretch of Gulf coast affected by the
spill are fed up with BP's failures to stop the spill. Thick oil is
coating birds and delicate wetlands in Louisiana.


      "I have anxiety attacks," said Sarah Rigaud, owner of Sarah's
Restaurant in Grand Isle, La., where the beach was closed because
blobs of oil that looked like melted chocolate had washed up on
shore. "Every day I pray that something happens, that it will be
stopped and everybody can get back to normal."


      Charlotte Randolph, president of Louisiana's Lafourche Parish,
one of the coastal parishes affected by the spill, said: "I mean,
it's wearing on everybody in this coastal region. You see it in
people's eyes. You see it. We need to stop the flow."


      "Tourism is dead. Fishing is dead. We're dying a slow death,"
she added.


      The Coast Guard approved portions of Louisiana's $350 million
plan to ring its coastline with a wall of sand meant to keep out
the oil.

Gallery

Environmental News

As BP labored for a second day Thursday to
choke off the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, dire new
government estimates showed the disaster has easily eclipsed the
Exxon Valdez as the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.


Gulf leak eclipses Exxon Valdez as worst US spill

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