Oil spill waste raises concerns in the gulf

Even though BP‘s busted well has stopped spewing oil, the disaster is still generating tons of soiled boom and other oily waste that federal and state laws allow to be buried at specially designated dumps, some near residential neighborhoods.

Officials in one Mississippi area, however, raised concerns about the magnitude and safety of the oil spill waste being buried nearby. On Thursday, Harrison County officials blocked it from being dumped in their community — potentially opening the door for others in the region to do the same.

County supervisors voted in June to stop BP from dumping waste at subcontractor Waste Management Inc.‘s Pecan Grove landfill in Pass Christian, Miss. When Waste Management balked, the county board commissioned independent testing of the waste and subpoenaed the company’s test results that reportedly showed it was not hazardous.

But rather than prolong the dispute, BP and Waste Management decided to stop dumping at Pecan Grove. The county, however, has continued with its waste testing and results are pending, said Tim Holleman, the county board’s attorney.

“Ultimately, I think people will raise the same issue elsewhere,” Holleman said.

A BP spokesman confirmed the agreement but defended the company’s waste management plan.

“This is industrial waste, and it’s suitable for industrial landfills,” said BP spokesman Mark Proegler. “If the localities have concerns about that, we’re certainly willing to talk with them.”

Spill waste is hauled from beaches and the ocean to more than 50 regional storage sites in all four gulf states, where it is packaged for shipment to recyclers, liquid waste processors and landfills. So far the spill has generated about 35,600 tons of solid waste.

In Louisiana, the formerly abandoned Grand Isle Shipyard has been transformed into a waste storage site, where about 150 workers pump oil from skimmer boats into storage tanks. More than 7.7 million gallons of oily liquid waste have been collected. At the docks, workers dump plastic bags of oily debris into dozens of dumpsters.

The sprawling operation is indicative of the cleanup industry that has grown out of the nation’s worst oil spill disaster. The now-capped well was spewing as many as 60,000 barrels of oil a day since the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

“Typically with a spill you’d have a bell-shaped curve where you deploy the boom, recover it and go home,” said Joe Kramer, project manager with BP subcontractor Miller Environmental Services Inc. “It’s more of an ongoing operation here.”

Waste samples are tested at storage sites by BP subcontractors to ensure they are, by law, nonhazardous. Much oil industry waste is not considered hazardous under a 1980 exemption carved out of the federal law.

Oil waste can be dumped in industrial-graded landfills, which are more strictly monitored than municipal dumps but not as isolated or restricted as hazardous waste sites.

“These are the type of facilities you want this waste to go to,” said Sam Phillips, solid waste permits administrator for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. “If something goes wrong, there are things we can do to prevent it from getting into a drinking-water aquifer.”

Members of the Gulf Coast congressional delegation said they intended to hold BP accountable for the health and safety of communities where spill waste was dumped.

“Gulf Coast residents have a right to be concerned about the waste placed in their landfills, and BP and its agents should do everything they can to work with local officials to address these concerns,” said Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) after a trip to spill-affected areas this month.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said tests by BP and her agency had shown that oil spill waste was not hazardous.

“The constituents of most of it are industrial waste, not hazardous, man-made chemicals, and it’s testing that way,” said Jackson, a chemical engineer by training. To reassure residents, Jackson ordered more EPA testing last month and required BP to release more information about waste testing, tracking and disposal.

But many gulf residents still worry.

“Anything that’s man-made can fail,” Harrison County Supervisor Marlin Ladner, a Mississippi lawmaker, said of the landfills. “The rig shows us that.”

Source: LA Times

Gulf spill lacks societal punch of Santa Barbara

WASHINGTON — In 1969, Sen. Gaylord Nelson was so moved after seeing the devastation of an oil spill off the California coast near Santa Barbara that he called for a national teach-in on the environment. The following year the resulting “Earth Day” kick-started the modern environmental movement and shaped the way Americans thought about their air, water and soil.

Forty years later, the magnitude of the Gulf oil spill far exceeds Santa Barbara’s spill of up to 100,000 barrels, but there hasn’t been a comparable societal transformation.

Last week, legislation imploded in the Senate to reduce greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, derailing environmentalists’ top goal, and no national consensus has emerged to move America off oil and other fossil fuels into clean energy. Even a new more modest Senate bill, aimed at boosting energy efficiency and preventing oil spills, faces an uncertain future.

Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat who had long championed the environment, laid out the idea of a teach-in during a speech in Seattle. He wrote the speech on napkins while flying there, recalls his daughter, Tia Nelson.

The senator’s call inspired the first Earth Day, with millions participating across the country, including 2,000 college campuses and 10,000 elementary and high schools. Congress adjourned so lawmakers could give speeches. In 1970, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act into law.

Worries about air pollution, the dangers of DDT and polluted rivers from industrial wastes played a part. But the Santa Barbara spill was the catalyst. It “triggered a social movement and helped to create a new politics, the politics of ecology,” mystery novelist Ross Macdonald once wrote.

In contrast, President Barack Obama last month used an Oval Office speech to push for clean energy, but Republicans accused him of trying exploit the Gulf tragedy for political gain. The president took it from both sides, as some liberal commentators faulted him for failing to specifically back a cap on carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming.

The Gulf spill is estimated between 94 million and 184 million gallons, far worse than Santa Barbara’s total. But the 10-day spill from a well blowout six miles offshore covered miles of California’s sandy beaches with a thick, oily sludge. Pictures of dead seals, dolphins and thousands of birds captured the nation’s attention.

“Santa Barbara’s psychological effect was huge, and it really got into the American mind in ways that clean air and clean water and other things had a hard time doing because they weren’t personified,” says Oliver A. Houck, who teaches environmental law at Tulane University in New Orleans. “So why hasn’t BP yet had the same transformative effect? When Santa Barbara came along it was a big deal. When BP comes along, there are so many big deals that it has a hard time competing for attention. That said, I think it’s got an enormous national play.”

The Santa Barbara spill featured its own version of Tony Hayward, the former chief executive of BP who angered people early on with comments such as “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” playing down the potential environmental impact.

In February 1969, Fred Hartley, the Canadian-born head of Union Oil Co., which owned the Santa Barbara well, told a Senate hearing in Washington:

“I am always tremendously impressed at the publicity that the death of birds receives vs. the loss of people in our country in this day and age.”

Noting there had been no loss of human lives from the Santa Barbara well blowout, Hartley added, “Relative to the number of deaths that have occurred in this fair city due to crime … it does seem that we should give this thing a little perspective.”

Hartley rejected calls to halt offshore drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel, citing arguments similar to those employed by opponents of the Obama administration’s moratorium. Hartley said he told Ronald Reagan, California’s governor then, that it would be like “making a decision to shut down the whole university educational system because there is a riot in San Francisco.”

Lois Capps, now a Democratic congresswoman representing Santa Barbara, was a young stay-at-home mother in 1969 who would often take her two children to the beaches there.

“It shaped my views along with everyone in the region,” she says. “It was such a devastating event. The spill was much closer to the shore, so we felt its impact sooner and more directly than this long, drawn-out affair we’re having in the Gulf.”

Capps says there has been a strong reaction in Congress to the BP Gulf spill, with dozens of hearings and several pieces of legislation making their way through the House and Senate. But it’s too early to draw conclusions about a societal shift, she says.

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” Capps says. “I think these things build like a tidal wave.”

Gaylord Nelson’s speech calling for a teach-in came eight months after the January 1969 spill, and the resulting Earth Day didn’t take place until more than a year later — April 1970. And it was not until 1981 that Congress imposed a ban on offshore drilling along most of the nation’s coastal waters, an action widely attributed to the memories of the Santa Barbara spill a dozen years earlier. The moratorium endured for a quarter century, until Congress lifted it in 2008.

“I think we’re going to see a really significant response to what happened in the Gulf played out over time,” says Sarah Chasis, ocean initiative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I think it’s going to affect people’s consciousness, thinking, the way they approach issues for a long time.”

There are signs this is starting to happen. An Associated Press poll last month found that 72 percent of Americans rated the environment as extremely important or very important — up from 64 percent in May and 59 percent in April.

Actor Ted Danson, a board member for the international ocean conservation group Oceana, says the focus has until now been stopping the leak.

“I am hopeful. I think the time will come,” Danson says. “Oil is a very, very powerful lobby. And the basic feeling out in the world, and I think mostly created by people whose interests are in oil, is that alternative energy is a very sweet, kind, loving thought, but certainly its day has not come. We need oil.”

James “Bud” Bottoms, a Santa Barbara resident who co-founded “Get Oil Out” in 1969, says the Gulf spill reminded him of those days.

“The same thing happened here,” says Bottoms, now 82. “We stood there on our banks and saw our harbors and beaches black, about two or three inches of thick goo. We stood here and cried along our beach. We thought our lives were over here in Santa Barbara.”

Bottoms penned a children’s book in 1969 called “Davey and the GOM,” which wasn’t published until 2008. “GOM” stands for “Giant Oil Monster.”

It’s also the acronym the offshore drilling industry and government regulators use for something else: The Gulf of Mexico.

Source: MSNBC

Good News for Gulf Fishermen

In response to the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the federal government closed off vast areas of the ocean to fishing operations. Much of the area was closed off as a precaution, even if it was minimally touched by the spreading oil, to avoid a public health disaster from contaminated seafood. The good news is that about one-third of that closed off area has just been reopened by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In the 26,388 square miles to be reopened, no oil has been observed for the past thirty days.

According to agreed-upon protocol, this decision was made after consulting with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Gulf states to determine public health concerns. The conclusion was that the water is sufficiently clean and the fish are safe to eat.

The US Coast Guard has been doing fly-overs for the past thirty days and have seen no traces of oil in the reopened area. Scientific models also show the trajectory of the existing oil contamination moving away from the area. Plus, NOAA has caught fish from the area and tested them. The results showed no sign of contamination.

“Today’s decision is good news for Gulf fishermen and American consumers,” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said. “Following the best science for this re-opening provides important assurance to the American people that the seafood they buy is safe and protects the Gulf seafood brand and the many people who depend on it for their livelihoods.”

The reopened area is located southeast of the former Deepwater Horizon rig. It stretches north to south along the west Florida shelf in the Gulf. The closest it comes to the former rig location is 190 miles.

NOAA had originally banned fishing in as much as 37 percent of the entire Gulf of Mexico. With the recent reopening, there still remains 57,539 square miles of the Gulf still closed off. NOAA will continue to test the fish and have set up dockside tests for commercial catches from the reopened area to ensure quality. They will also continue to monitor the closed-off areas, and open them back up to fishermen as soon as they are deemed safe.

According to the EPA, the Gulf’s commercial fish and shellfish harvest is roughly 1.3 billion pounds and was worth approximately $661 million in 2008. The shrimp harvest alone is 188.8 million pounds, worth about $367 million per year. These totals have been significantly reduced due to the BP Deepwater Horizon rig disaster. The announcement is sure to be most welcome to the Gulf fishing industry as it struggles to get back onto its feet.

For more information please visit: http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/

Oil-eating Whale or ‘white elephant’?

The fancifully named A Whale, a seagoing behemoth converted into what its owners are calling the world’s biggest oil skimmer, is being billed as a cleanup hitter in the effort to prevent millions of gallons of oil spewing from BP’s ruptured well from ever reaching shore.

TMT, the Taiwanese company that owns the massive ship, estimates that it can suck as much as 500,000 barrels of oily water a day through its “jaws” — six ports cut into each side near its bow — and remove much of the crude through a “decanting” process using internal separation tanks.

“In the final stage, the filtered water can be returned to the ocean while the heavy oil residue is transferred to tankers for storage and final disposition,” TMT says in promotional materials outlining what it calls “the best solution to the Gulf of Mexico spill crisis.”

It will float across the Gulf “like a lawnmower cutting the grass,” effectively doubling the skimming capability of the oil response effort, CEO Nobu Su told reporters last week in Norfolk, Va., during a stopover at which company officials revealed what they hope will be the A Whale’s new mission.

But before the 1,115-foot-long ship with the big blue whale on funnel has even undergone testing, some experts are questioning whether it can fulfill those lofty expectations.

“I don’t think the concept is that bad, but I don’t see how in this situation it’s going to be a significant player,” said Dennis Bryant, a former Coast Guard officer who worked on implementing regulations required by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 before retiring and starting a maritime consulting business in Gainesville, Fla.

“In a case like the Exxon Valdez spill, where you had a lot of oil on the surface in a confined area, a vessel like this could have gone in and sucked up a whole lot,” he said. “But in the Gulf, where the oil is pretty well dispersed over a vast area, I don’t see how it’s going to make a large dent.”

For More click HERE

California alternative energy legislation gets broad backing

Reporting from Sacramento —

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is spurring California legislators and conflicting interest groups to settle past differences and adopt the nation’s toughest renewable energy law to reduce the state’s dependence on oil and serve as a model for other states.

The effort is supported by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is eager to burnish his environmental legacy before leaving office in January even though he vetoed a similar bill last fall.

Both the governor and the Democrats who control the Legislature want to require privately and publicly owned electric utilities to generate one-third of their power from wind, solar and other clean sources by 2020.

After last fall’s veto, Schwarzenegger issued an executive order unilaterally imposing the 33% renewable standard. But Democrats denounced the action as mainly symbolic because it does not bind future governors.

This year, Democrats came back with a compromise bill, which has its first legislative hearing Thursday in the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee.

“One needs only to look to the Gulf of Mexico and the tragedy and what happens when you just rely on oil,” Schwarzenegger said at an alternative fuel summit last week. “It is shameful how desperate and how dependent we have become on fossil fuels.”

With images of gushing crude and oil-covered birds dominating TV screens, Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, Susan P. Kennedy, said environmentalists, utilities generators, labor unions and other industry groups that waged war over last year’s bill now are meeting at least weekly and are closing in on a deal.

“I’m very optimistic,” she said. “There’s always been a consensus around the goal. It’s simply a matter of identifying what the obstacles are in the implementation.”

For Full Article Click HERE

Gulf oil spill: BP cuts pipe, clearing way for cap

Robots using giant hydraulic shears finished cutting away the pipe atop a BP well gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, clearing the way for a cap to be placed over the well on Thursday in an effort to contain the 45-day-old spill.

Cutting away the riser pipe is “a significant step forward,” Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, said at a briefing Thursday morning. “The challenge now is to seal that containment cap over it.”

Robot subs start to cut

Allen said the shears used in the cutting did not give the clean edges that officials had hoped for, which could make it more difficult to fit the cap tightly over the pipe. The shears were used after a diamond-edged saw got stuck Wednesday while cutting through the pipe.

“This is an irregular cut. It will be a bit more challenging” to tightly seal the cap over the ragged-edged opening through which oil is gushing, Allen said.

The cap was already suspended over the area and would be lowered into place within hours, he said.

The cap is intended to contain, not stop the flow of oil, but the tighter the cap, the more oil will be contained.

The spill is not expected to be fully controlled until August at the earliest, after two relief wells are completed.

In the meantime, the oil continues to spread, with the upper edge of the spill approaching Florida and 37% of gulf waters closed to fishing.

Hurricane season, which began June 1, poses a major problem to workers trying to finish the relief wells, something Allen acknowledged was a concern. He said officials had to face the possibility that a major storm would force a halt to work on the relief wells.

For article click HERE

New Ways to Drill, Old Methods for Cleanup

As hopes dim for containing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico anytime soon, more people are asking why the industry was not better prepared to react.

Members of Congress are holding hearings this week and demanding to know why the federal Minerals Management Service did not force oil companies to take more precautions. Environmentalists are saying they tried to raise the alarm to Congressional committees that the industry had no way to respond to a catastrophic blowout a mile below the sea.

Local officials in the gulf are beginning to ask, “What was Plan B?” The answer, oil industry engineers are acknowledging, was to deploy technology that has not changed much in 20 years — booms, skimmers and chemical dispersants — even as the drilling technology itself has improved.

“They have horribly underestimated the likelihood of a spill and therefore horribly underestimated the consequences of something going wrong,” said Robert G. Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies offshore drilling. “So what we have now is some equivalent of a fire drill with paper towels and buckets for cleanup.”

For years, major oil companies, as well as the Minerals Management Service, played down the possibility of an uncontrolled blowout on the sea floor, arguing that safeguards like blowout preventers were practically foolproof.

In November, Walter D. Cruickshank, deputy director of the Minerals Management Service, told a Senate committee that an undersea blowout and massive spill that had occurred in East Timor last year was highly unlikely in the Gulf of Mexico because of tighter United States regulations. All wells had safety devices to shut off the flow in emergencies, he said.

At the same hearing, a BP vice president, David Rainey, promoted the oil companies’ “blowout preventer technology, which includes redundant systems and controls” and told senators that “contrary to popular perception, ours is a high-tech industry.”

What government regulators and industry officials did not foresee in the Deepwater Horizon disaster last month is that the rig would sink and that robots would not be able to stanch the flow of oil at such depths, even though a consultant hired by government regulators in 2003 had warned that they were unreliable.

“This is the first time the industry has had to confront this issue in this water depth, and there is a lot of real-time learning going on,” BP’s chief executive officer, Tony Hayward, acknowledged at a news conference Monday. “The investigation of this whole incident will undoubtedly show up things that we should be doing differently.”

Once oil was flowing into the water, the methods of dealing with it have changed little in decades, environmentalists say. Tenting spills with giant upside-down funnels has been done in shallower waters, but until last weekend, it had not been tried in deep water. The first attempt failed.

“The oil industry went off the deep end with a new kind of risk, and they didn’t bother to build a response capability before they had a big disaster,” said Richard Charter, an advocate with Defenders of Wildlife who studies offshore drilling.

The heart of the industry’s plan to contain the oil falls to the Marine Spill Response Corporation, a nonprofit organization formed in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez disaster. It is maintained largely by fees from the biggest oil companies.

Judith Roos, a vice president of Marine Spill Response, said the majority of its equipment, including booms and skimmers, was bought in 1990. “The technology hasn’t changed that much since then,” she said.

Steve Benz, president of the corporation, said his group had no budget for research.

In the last three years, however, the company has added C-130 planes to spray dispersants. On this, the company says, it is ahead of the regulatory curve.

Allison Nyholm, a policy adviser with the American Petroleum Institute, said the industry had done extensive experiments with improving skimmers, booms and dispersants. Some booms are fire retardant and allow burning on the water, for example, while others actually absorb oil.

She noted that blowout scenarios were rare and needed to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

“One of the best tools is how you bring the best professionals together to respond to the spill,” Ms. Nyholm said. “It is not the dispersant or the boom or the burn, it is how quickly can you get the right people together.”

Yet Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and frequent consultant on big oil spills, said the oil companies could have had some version of the containment dome ready before the spill, rather than building one after it happened.

“It is like building the fire truck when your house is on fire,” Dr. Steiner said.

Engineers who work on rig structures said such prefabricated containment domes would not be practical. They said that each dome would have to be tailored to the spill, so there was little sense in making one beforehand.

Jeffrey Short, a former scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who now works for the environmental group Oceana, said it was clear that the industry was not willing to pay for enough boats and booms to enclose such a fast-growing spill.

“It’s just really hard to corral something that’s expanding at that rate,” Dr. Short said. “Ultimately it’s an investment challenge. How much money are you willing to spend on an event that happens infrequently?”

Several environmentalists also said the industry should have predicted that a blowout of this magnitude would eventually happen. John F. Amos, a former geologist for oil companies who now runs an organization that tracks oil spills using satellite images, told Congress last fall that the undersea blowout in East Timor was a warning. It leaked for 10 weeks before crews managed to drill relief wells. “Blowouts are surprisingly regular occurrences,” he said. “But ones that lead to catastrophic spills like this are quite rare.”

Jerome J. Schubert, an engineer at Texas A&M who has written extensively about undersea drilling, found in a 2005 study that “blowouts will always happen no matter how far technology and training advance” and that there were no foolproof safeguards to stop them. The study, co-written by Samuel F. Noynaert and financed by BP, found that blowouts in undersea wells had occurred at a steady rate since the 1960s despite improvements in technology.

“The best safeguards don’t always work,” he said.

Click HERE for article

Dolphin, turtle deaths eyed for links to oil spill

(Reuters) – Scientists are examining the deaths of at least six dolphins and over 100 sea turtles along the U.S. Gulf Coast in recent weeks to see if they are victims of the giant oil spill in the region, wildlife officials said on Thursday.

Science |  Green Business |  Lifestyle

All of the deaths are being looked at as possible casualties of the oil gushing unchecked since April 20 from a ruptured wellhead on the floor of the Gulf off Louisiana because of their proximity in time and space to the spill.

But none of the dolphins or turtles examined showed any obvious visible signs of oil contamination.

Necropsies — the animal equivalent of autopsies — are being performed, and tissue samples analyzed to determine if oil ingestion caused the deaths. The results are expected to take about two weeks.

“So far we have not seen any relationship with the deaths of either the turtles or the dolphins to oil,” Dr. Moby Solangi, head of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies, told Reuters TV in Gulfport, Mississippi.

But Solangi added it was only a matter of time before the spilled oil began affecting the dolphin population. “There is no question that the oil is in their habitat,” he said.

Connie Barclay, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said scientists were investigating the deaths of six dolphins and 117 sea turtles along the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida since April 30.

Sources close to the Gulf’s wildlife spill-response teams put the number of dolphin deaths at seven.

Either way, federal wildlife officials said dolphin and turtle mortality seen since the oil rig explosion off Louisiana last month is not unusually high for this time of year.

TOO SOON FOR CONCLUSIONS

A few of the deaths were ruled out as spill-related because they occurred before the spill or were animals that were known to have been sick or injured beforehand, the sources said.

Solangi said dolphins were at the top of the aquatic food chain in the ocean and also acted like the “canary in the coal mine” in that their experience and behavior can give advance warning to humans of impending disasters and catastrophes.

Wildlife officials have expressed particular concern for the well-being of sea turtles in the Gulf following the spill because all five species that inhabit the region are endangered, and it is their spring nesting season.

On a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, NOAA officials said it was still too early to draw firm conclusions from the latest wildlife casualties in the Gulf.

“We don’t have definitive information for most of the … (animals) that have been found,” said Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere.

Impacts on bird life has been relatively light to date, according to wildlife specialists.

“So far, relatively few birds have been brought in with oil on their feathers,” said David Ringer of the National Audubon Society, who put the number at between 12 and 20.

“The birds that have been brought in are birds that catch fish in open waters” and would have come in contact with oil there, he said.

Oil spill given ‘national significance’ designation

(CNN) – An oil spill off Louisiana was designated a spill of “national significance” Thursday, meaning assets can be drawn from other states and areas to combat it, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.

The U.S. military may be called on to assist authorities scrambling to mitigate the potential environmental disaster posed by the spill as it expands toward the Gulf Coast, the Coast Guard said.

In addition, another controlled burn of the oil slick may be conducted, Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Erik Swanson said.

Officials said late Wednesday the estimated amount of oil spewing into the Gulf from three underwater leaks after last week’s oil rig explosion has increased to as much as 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day — five times more than what was initially believed.

The cause of the explosion remains under investigation, and search efforts have been halted for 11 missing workers.

Rear Adm. Mary Landry told reporters late Wednesday that the increased estimate is based on analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“This is not an exact science when you estimate the amount of oil,” Landry said, noting there are a lot of variables in calculating the rate of the spill.

“However, NOAA is telling me now that they prefer we use the 5,000 barrels a day as an estimate of what has actually leaked from this well and will continue to leak until BP secures the source.”

Some 250,000 gallons of oily water have been collected from the scene, she said.

BP is the owner of the well, while Transocean Ltd. owns and operates the rig.

“I do not disagree with the admiral’s estimate that it could be 5,000 barrels a day — it’s clearly within the range of uncertainty,” said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer for BP, who joined Landry at Wednesday’s news conference.

Gulf Coast braces for an oily mess

Top operations planners briefed Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday morning in anticipation of the possible request for assistance from the Coast Guard, said spokesman Capt. John Kirby.

Mullen was told the weather is worsening, and the oil is set to reach the Louisiana coast Friday, Kirby said. Wind patterns out of the Southeast over the next few hours are increasing the likelihood the oil will come ashore.

“This is just prudent military planning,” Kirby said. “This thing is not getting better.”

iReport: How is the oil spill affecting you? Share images, information

Military planners on Wednesday night began examining options to provide assistance to the Coast Guard in cleaning up the spill, said James Graybeal, a spokesman for U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Northern Command is responsible for coordinating and providing military assistance inside the United States.

The military could put a ship in the Gulf to support and resupply other vessels in the region or provide aircraft to help map the spill.

The military also may offer to establish a supply base along the coast to stage equipment and other supplies for the Coast Guard and the overall cleanup effort, according to a U.S. military source. The military has larger bases and the ability to stage equipment for a longer-term operation, the source said. In addition, the U.S. Navy has booming equipment it can use.

Officials are trying to get resources on land, place booming equipment around the spill and have personnel ready to go when the oil reaches land.

Drilling a relief well — a second well drilled up to a mile or two away that would enter the leaking well at an angle to help plug it — takes time, Swanson said.

The first rig to be used for drilling the relief well will begin drilling about a half-mile from the leaking well Friday, NOAA said. However, the relief well will not be complete for months, it said.

In addition, a collection dome will be deployed to the seafloor to collect oil as it leaks from the well, NOAA said. “This method has never been tried at this depth before,” it said.

Another burn of the oil is “certainly an option,” the Coast Guard’s Swanson said. “We utilized it yesterday. We were able to do a test burn, which was successful, and we’re going to see if we can do that today, pending good weather.”

BP and the Coast Guard corralled part of the oil slick using a 500-foot, specially designed boom and then set it ablaze. The flames were expected to destroy between 50 percent to 90 percent of the oil in that section, and winds were expected to blow the resulting cloud of smoke and soot out to sea, Lt. Cmdr. Matt Moorlag, a Coast Guard spokesman, said before Wednesday’s burn.

The oil spill has the potential to become one of the worst in U.S. history, the Coast Guard’s Landry said earlier.

The head of BP Group told CNN’s Brian Todd in an exclusive interview Wednesday that the accident could have been prevented, and he focused blame on rig owner Transocean.

CEO Tony Hayward said that Transocean’s blowout preventer failed to operate before the explosion. A blowout preventer is a large valve at the top of a well, and activating it will stop the flow of oil. The valve may be closed during drilling if underground pressure drives up oil or natural gas, threatening the rig.

“That is the ultimate fail-safe mechanism,” Hayward said. “And for whatever reason — and we don’t understand that yet, but we clearly will as a consequence of both our investigation and federal investigations — it failed to operate.

“And that is the key issue here, the failure of the Transocean BOP,” Hayward said, describing the valve as “an integral part of the drilling rig.”

A Transocean spokesman on Wednesday declined to respond to Hayward’s comments in the CNN interview, citing pending litigation against both companies.

However, Transocean Vice President Adrian Rose has said its oil rig had no indication of problems before the explosion.

Asked whether the accident could have prevented, Hayward said, “All accidents can be prevented — there’s no doubt about that.”

At least one of the victims’ families has filed a lawsuit against BP and Transocean, accusing BP specifically of negligence.

“The responsibility for safety on the drilling rig is with Transocean,” Hayward added. “It is their rig, their equipment, their people, their systems, their safety processes.”

He insisted that, despite reports to the contrary, BP has not resisted attempts at tightening safety regulations.

“We welcome tighter safety regulations. But we’d like them to be applied in a way that makes them practically impermeable.”

The slick stretched about 100 miles across the north-central Gulf on Wednesday afternoon and had advanced to within 16 miles of the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Coast Guard reported.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the slick was expected to hit the state’s southeastern shoreline later this week.

Jindal said the state has asked for 55,000 feet of booms to keep oil away from the marshy, environmentally delicate coast that’s rich in shellfish and wildlife.

“We want to approach this situation the same way we would approach a hurricane or other natural disaster,” he said. “We think it’s best to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”

Most of the slick is a thin sheen on the water’s surface. About 3 percent of it is a heavy, puddinglike crude oil.

Efforts are under way to position boom material around sensitive ecological areas. Five staging areas have been set up on land, stretching from Venice, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Florida.

CNN’s Barbara Starr contributed to this report.

Coast Guard to burn Gulf oil slick

Authorities will start burning some of the thickest oil in a massive slick from a rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana on Wednesday morning, the Coast Guard said.

Fire-resistant containment booms will be used to corral some of the oil on surface, which will then be ignited, Petty Officer 2nd Class Prentice Danner said. It was unclear how large an area will be set on fire or how far from shore the first fire would be set.

Crews have been unable to stop thousands of barrels of oil from fouling Gulf waters since the April 20 explosion sank the Deepwater Horizon, which was drilling 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. Eleven workers are missing and presumed dead, and the cause of the blast has not been determined.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry earlier said the controlled burns would be done during the day far from shore. Crews would make sure marine life and people were protected and that work on other oil rigs would not be interrupted.

Ed Overton, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University, questioned the method of getting rid of the oil slick.

“It can be effective in calm water, not much wind, in a protected area,” he said. “When you’re out in the middle of the ocean, with wave actions and currents pushing you around, it’s not easy.”

He had another concern: The oil samples from the spill he’s looked at shows it to be a sticky substance similar to roofing tar.

“I’m not super optimistic. This is tarry crude that lies down in the water,” he said. “But it’s something that has got to be tried.”

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