Flow of oil into the sea is stemmed as BP blasts mud deep into the leaking well

Seal: Heavy mud is being pumped into the pipeline, with a view to then shutting it completely with cement

Live feed: A TV camera shows the oil leak as BP starts the 'top kill' on the ruptured well

BP’s gamble to plug the torrent of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico by pumping mud to block the leak appears to have paid off.

US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said the risky ‘top kill’ operation had succeeded in dramatically dropping the oil pressure from the leak one-mile under the ocean.

Once the oil flow is stemmed completely, engineers will begin filling the hole with cement to entomb the well.
‘We’ll get this under control,’ said Admiral Allen, the National Incident Commander, who has been put in overall charge of the operation by President Obama.

The breakthrough came as US scientists claimed the amount of oil that has flooded into the sea was up to four times more than BP estimates and has easily eclipsed the Exxon Valdez disaster to become the worst oil leak in American history.
The British-based oil giant was said to be cautiously optimistic over its latest bid to cap the leak.

It was given a 70 per cent chance of success when the risky operation was launched on Wednesday afternoon.


Crackdown: The Obama administration has announced that oil drilling in Alaska will be suspended until 2011 in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico disaster

Clean up: Workers contracted by BP attempt to clear a beach in Port Fourchon of oil

Disaster: A green heron covered in oil is rescued near Venice, Louisiana. The slick has so far affected around 100 miles of the coastline

Health concerns: Four crew members of commercial shipping helping with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have fallen ill

‘The operation is proceeding as we planned it,’ said BP boss Tony Hayward.

Crews were still injecting heavy drilling mud deep into the well at high velocity from two tankers on the surface.
But Admiral Allen said that unless there was an unforeseen last-minute hitch – always possible with such a delicate operation so far below the surface – then the ‘top kill’ strategy was working.

The plan relies on the dense mixture overcoming the pressure of oil and gas rising in the 13,000-ft deep well, basically stuffing the flow back down the hole.

If the plug holds, then the focus will turn to cleaning up the environmental catastrophe that has spilled more than 17 million gallons of crude into the sea off the coast of Louisiana.

US Geological Survey Director Dr Marcia Nutt said that a government task force has estimated that BP’s claim that 210,000 gallons of oil a day had leaked since the oil rig explosion on April 20, which killed eleven workers, was woefully off the mark.
The Exxon Valdez spilled about eleven million gallons into the ocean in Alaska in 1989.

Dr Nutt claimed that a final reckoning could show that the crude pouring from the well before it was capped could eventually tally as much as a million gallons a day.

Marine scientists have discovered a massive new plume of what they believe to be oil deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, stretching 22 miles from the leaking wellhead northeast toward Mobile Bay, Alabama.

President Obama is set to make his second trip to the disaster area on Friday to see at first hand the ooze that has now reached the coastline in Louisiana after weeks of lurking just offshore.
His visit came a day after Elizabeth Birnbaum, the head of the US government agency that oversees offshore drilling, was forced to resign amid a flurry of finger-pointing over the lax regulation that may have contributed to the cause of the rig blast.

At a press conference, Mr Obama announced a moratorium on offshore drilling.

He also defended his administration from claims that it hadn’t reacted quickly enough to the environmental nightmare and had allowed BP to control the operation.

Mr Obama said that while BP was responsible for the ‘horrific disaster’, the government has been in charge ‘since day one.’
'This notion, that for the last three or four somehow the federal government is sitting on the sidelines and we've just been letting BP make the decisions, is not true,' he said.
He didn’t comment on the success of the ‘top drill’ attempt, but he said the government had approved the move and aides were closely monitoring its progress. ‘We are exploring any reasonable strategy,’ said Mr Obama.

President Obama said he is suspending operations at 33 oil wells off the US coast until an investigation into the cause of the BP blast is completed.
'I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down. It doesn't mean we are not going to make any mistakes, but there shouldn't be any confusion, the federal government is fully engaged.

'I wake up every morning thinking about it and I go to bed at night thinking about it,' he said.

Mr Obama added that even when he was shaving in the morning, his eleven-year-old daughter, Malia, walked into the bathroom and said: 'Have you plugged the hole yet, daddy?' Adding 'I grew up in Hawaii, where the ocean is sacred.'