ON THE GULF OF MEXICO | Workers gathered to begin lowering a giant concrete-and-steel box over the blown-out BP oil well at the bottom of the sea Thursday in a risky and untested effort to capture most of the gushing crude and avert a wider environmental disaster.
“We haven’t done this before. It’s very complex, and we can’t guarantee it,” BP spokesman David Nicholas warned.
The 100-ton containment vessel is designed to collect as much as 85 percent of the oil spewing into the Gulf and funnel it up to a tanker. It could take several hours to lower it into place by crane, after which a steel pipe will be installed between the top of the box and the tanker. The whole structure could be operating by Sunday.
In Washington, a Senate panel announced that Lamar McKay, chairman and president of BP America, will testify at a hearing Tuesday looking into the disaster.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee also will hear from Steven L. Newman, head of Transocean Ltd, which leased BP the oil rig that exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and rupturing pipes that are spewing oil into the Gulf.
The technology to cap the well has been used a few times in shallow waters but never at such extreme depths - 5,000 feet down, where the water pressure is enough to crush a submarine.
The box - which looks a lot like a 40-foot-high peaked outhouse, especially on the inside, with its rough timber framing - must be positioned accurately over the well or it could damage the leaking pipe and make the problem worse.
Oil slicks stretched for miles off the Louisiana coast, where desperate efforts were under way to skim, corral and set the petroleum ablaze. People in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida watched and waited in despair.
On Thursday, oil reached several barrier islands off the Louisiana coast, many of them fragile animal habitats. Several birds were spotted diving into the oily, pinkish-brown water, and dead jellyfish washed up on the uninhabited islands.
“It’s all over the place. We hope to get it cleaned up before it moves up the west side of the river,” said Dustin Chauvin, a 20-year-old shrimp-boat captain from Terrebonne Parish, La. “That’s our whole fishing ground.”
A six-member board composed of representatives of the Coast Guard and the federal Minerals Management Service will begin investigating the accident next week.
And a federal judicial panel in Washington has been asked to consolidate at least 65 potential class-action lawsuits claiming economic damage from the spill. Commercial fishermen, business and resort owners, charter-boat captains, even would-be vacationers have sued from Texas to Florida, seeking damages that could reach into the billions.
“It’s just going to kill us. It’s going to destroy us,” said Dodie Vegas, who owns a motel and cabins in Grand Isle, La.
The Obama administration is offering low-interest loans to businesses in parts of the Gulf Coast that have suffered financial losses from the spill.
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