BP said this evening that the top kill method being used to plug the damaged wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico is working according to plan and that it appears that drilling mud is coming out of the well, not oil. The hope is to eventually seal the well with cement. BP CEO Tony Hayward said that it will be 24 hours before they know if the method is working.
Four workers fell ill today after working on fishing boats assisting with cleanup in Breton Sound, Louisiana. One of the workers told the Los Angeles Times that he was not given safety equipment. According to the article:
“They [BP officials] told us if we ran into oil, it wasn’t supposed to bother us,” [Fisherman George] Jackson said. “As far as gloves, no, we haven’t been wearing any gloves.”
Robert Kaluza, a top BP official who was on the Deepwater Horizon hours before the explosions on April 20, refused to testify in front of Congress today, invoking the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-criminalization. Kaluza's decision opens up the possiblity of criminal liability for BP. An engineer who did testify today described an argument that took place that day aboard the oii rig. From McClatchy:
Employees and experts testified that in the hours before the explosion, they witnessed a power struggle over that decision — the kind of argument common among the different parties that lease and run complicated offshore drilling operations, but one that this time, had deadly consequences.
News was released today that two other wells in the Gulf of Mexico were capped last week due to problems with blowout preventers. One well was being operated at 4,400 feet by Transocean, the same company that was operating the Deepwater Horizon at the time of the explosions on April 20 that led the rig to sink two days later, pumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf.
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