Under fire: Sixty-nine per cent of Americans are unhappy with how Barack Obama, speaking yesterday in Maryland, is handling the Gulf oil spill crisis
Patches of oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill are burned in the Gulf of Mexico
A woman holds a sign depicting BP CEO Tony Hayward that reads 'Guilty as Charged', beside a prison jumpsuit intended for Hayward left on the door of the office building where the Washington DC headquarters of BP
Barack Obama’s popularity is slipping in the wake of America’s worst oil spill.
More Americans - 69 per cent - are unhappy about the U.S. president’s administration's response to the BP disaster than disapproved of George Bush's botched handling of Hurricane Katrina five years ago, according to a poll.
In a separate survey, nearly half – 48 per cent - of people questioned by the Washington Post said the U.S. president does not understand their problems – the highest figure yet.
There is also a sharp rise in the number of people who believe Mr Obama’s policies are making the economy worse rather than better, according to the Pew Research Center.
Patches of oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill are seen from an underwater vantage
Marine reef ecologist Scott Porter works to remove oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill off his hands
Oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill pools against the Louisiana coast along Barataria Bay
Protection: Sand is pumped on to East Grand Terre Island, Lousiana, to provide a barrier against the oil spill
A BP executive said today the company expected to be capturing virtually all the oil leaking by early next week.
Chief operating officer Doug Suttles said in Gulf Shores, Alabama, that the flow should decrease 'to a relative trickle' by Monday or Tuesday.
Mr Suttles said a second pumping ship should improve the process and a new containment cap being built would seal better and reduce leakage.
However, the oil giant sought to clarify the comments by saying that even though the company was optimistic it could make measurable progress in the next week in reducing the flow, it would take more time to reach the point that the spill amounted to a trickle.
But while BP is capturing more oil from the blown-out well with every passing day, scientists on a team analysing the flow said yesterday that the amount of crude still escaping was considerably greater than that claimed by the U.S. government and the company.
Their assertions - combined with BP's rush to build a bigger cap and its apparent difficulty in immediately processing all the oil being collected - have only added to the impression that BP and the government are still floundering in dealing with the catastrophe and may be misleading the public.
It comes as Mr Obama hit out angrily at BP boss Tony Hayward as the U.S. backlash against the British oil giant turned ugly.
In his toughest words yet on America's worst oil spill, Mr Obama said he was focusing on 'whose ass to kick' and would have fired Mr Hayward for his past comments downplaying the scale of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
The increasingly belligerent president was asked in a TV interview about Mr Hayward's remarks that the Gulf of Mexico was 'a big ocean', 'the environmental impact is likely to be very, very modest' and that he 'wanted his life back' after being in the eye of the storm over the spill.
'He wouldn't be working for me after any of those statements,' said Mr Obama.
Frustrated at the slow progress in containing the flow of oil from the mile-deep leak, the president has been increasingly outspoken about BP and its inability to resolve the crisis since its rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers.
'I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick,' he said.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats yesterday proposed a fivefold increase in the tax that oil companies pay into a spill liability fund.
The legislation would raise the tax on oil produced offshore from 8 cents a barrel to 41 cents a barrel - 7 cents higher than legislation that passed the House last month.
Critics claim the devastation caused by the spill that has now spread to some of Florida's white sandy tourist beaches could seriously harm the chances of Mr Obama's Democrat Party in November's midterm elections.
But the President insisted on NBC's Today programme that he had been on top of the calamity from the start.
Continuing his attack on BP, he said: 'The initial reports indicate there may be situations in which not only human error was involved, but you also saw some corner- cutting in terms of safety.'
His comments will increase the pressure on Mr Hayward whose family are living in fear of reprisals over the spill after receiving threatening phone calls at their home.
Police have launched a security operation to protect Mr Hayward's wife Maureen and their two children at their isolated £1million home in rural Kent.
Mrs Hayward said the family had received several threatening phone calls and hate mail claiming to be from environmental groups.
She said one letter purported to be from Greenpeace, although Greenpeace strongly denied sending any letters to the family.
Mrs Hayward said the abuse had been 'upsetting' and left them feeling 'rather uncomfortable', particularly with her husband thousands of miles away.
In another sign of the growing rift between BP and the U.S. government, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said he was no longer trusting the company's estimates on the amount of crude still flowing into the sea.
He said a containment cap on the ruptured pipe was capturing up to 462,000 gallons of oil a day, about 11,000 barrels. BP put the figure at 466,200 gallons.
However, according to U.S. scientists BP's Deepwater Horizon well could be spewing out more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day.
BP has given various estimates of how much oil it believes has leaked out but said from the start that the 'worst case scenario' was about 100,000 barrels.
The doomsday prediction appears to have been accurate, according to advisers to the U.S. Government.
One, Professor Ira Leifer, said: 'In the data I've seen, there's nothing inconsistent with BP's worst case scenario.'
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