BP chief: coastal spill may get much worse

A senior BP executive today indicated that the oil washing up on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico could be just the start of a 50-day build-up of pollution.

Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said the oil now hitting Louisiana, Alabama and Florida was spilled soon after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion on April 20.

BP declined to comment on the remarks.



A third of the Gulf’s waters remain closed to fishing and beaches are increasingly awash with oil and dead birds and animals at the start of the tourist season.

US forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed yesterday that they had found evidence of an undersea oil plume at a size of 3,300 feet more than 40 miles from the well drilled by BP, the first such plume to be officially confirmed after BP claimed none had been detected.

Mr Suttles told the Associated Press that the company was optimistic of more progress in capturing oil escaping from the leak within the next week.

But his comments came as a team working on a new estimate of the extent of the spill said the flow could be far greater than previous BP and US government estimates.

Steve Werely, an engineering professor helping to research the flow on behalf of the US Coast Guard and US Geological Survey, said it was a “reasonable conclusion”, though not final, that flow from the well might equal between 798,000 and 1.8 million gallons, rather than the 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons previously estimated by the government.

“BP is claiming they’re capturing the majority of the flow, which I think is going to be proven wrong in short order,” Mr Werely said.

“Why don’t they show the American public the before-and-after shots? It’s strictly an estimation, and they are portraying it as fact.”

Another scientist on the same team, Ira Leifer of the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, told reporters the flow could be up to 100,000 barrels per day – or 4.2 million gallons – but admitted the flow rate remained “the great unknown”.

Before BP cut the leaking pipe to undertake the “capping” procedure, the government warned the procedure could increase the leak.

The cap that was put on the ruptured well last week collected about 620,000 gallons of oil on Monday and another 330,000 gallons by noon on Tuesday, according to Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen.

That would mean the cap is capturing more than half of the oil based on the existing government estimate. However, underwater video of the leak continued to show clouds of black oil emerging from around the cap, indicating previous estimates of the flow had been too low and sending the US government back to the drawing board.

President Obama is to make his fourth trip to the region since the spill on Monday and Tuesday, visiting Mississippi, Alabama and Florida for updates.

With surveys showing increasing discontent with his leadership, Mr Obama has issued increasingly angry rhetoric against BP as it scrambles to respond to the ongoing crisis.

He told NBC on Monday he was consulting experts to find out “whose ass to kick” and had not spoken to BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, because “he’s gonna say all the right things to me”. He added: “I’m not interested in words. I’m interested in actions.”