Brewing storm hinders efforts to plug BP well

NEW ORLEANS | Tropical rainstorms moving toward the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday threatened to shut down undersea efforts to seal BP’s ruptured well, interrupting work just as engineers get close to plugging the leak with mud and cement.

A weather system brewing in the Caribbean prompted crews to temporarily cork a relief tunnel deep beneath the seafloor, BP Vice President Kent Wells said Wednesday afternoon. The storm is still hundreds of miles away and may never reach the area, but the oil giant doesn’t want to risk damaging BP’s best bet at permanently sealing the well.

“What we didn’t want to do is be in the middle of an operation and potentially put the relief well at some risk,” he said. “It just seemed like the logical thing to do.”

Forecasters say the storm system likely will move into the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend, although it appears to be weakening. Right now, it has a 50 percent chance of becoming a tropical depression or storm within the next 48 hours.

It could force crews to abandon their watch over the experimental cap that’s been bottling oil a mile below the surface of the water for nearly a week, said retired U.S. Coast GuardAdm. Thad Allen, the federal government’s point man on the spill.

Scientists have been scrutinizing underwater cameras and data for days, trying to determine if the cap is displacing pressure and causing leaks underground. If storms keep them from seeing the cap and getting those readings - for up to four days, Adm. Allen said - BP could reopen the well to avoid missing signs it is buckling.

“This is necessarily going to be a judgment call,” said Adm. Allen, who will make the ultimate decision.

Boat captains helping skim oil as part of BP’s “vessels of relief” program said the company is already telling them to clear out of the Gulf.

Captains who showed up at docks to skim for oil Wednesday were sent home and told they wouldn’t be going back out for five or six days because of weather, said Tom Ard, president of the Orange Beach Fishing Association.

Even if the storm doesn’t hit the area directly, it could affect containment and cleanup. Hurricane Alex didn’t get closer than 500 miles from the spill in late June, yet offshore skimming in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida was essentially curtailed for nearly a week.

In Florida, crews were removing protective boom intended to buffer the state’s inland waterways in the Panhandle from oil. High winds and storm surge could carry the boom into sensitive wetlands, damaging those areas.

Adm. Allen said BP and government scientists were meeting to discuss whether the cap could be monitored from the shore.

It could take several days to evacuate ships from the well site 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, where the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, killing 11 and touching off one of America’s worst environmental crises.

Adm. Allen said an evacuation could delay operations as much as two weeks before work would resume to kill the well at the bottom.

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