As President Obama visited Louisiana on Friday to assess a growing environmental disaster on the Gulf Coast, the chief executive of BP pointed to progress in combating a five-week-old oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico but said it would take another two days to know whether the latest effort has been successful.
Appearing on morning news shows, BP chief Tony Hayward said the company would resume pumping heavy mud Friday afternoon into a blown-out, gushing oil well about a mile below the surface in a technique known as "top kill." BP began the top-kill operation Wednesday afternoon in an attempt to cap the well.
Haywood said on CNN that a live video feed of the broken well showed that the material now gushing from it is mud, which he called "good news" in efforts to plug the leaking oil. But he said engineers would not know for another 48 hours whether the top-kill method has worked, and he retracted his early prediction that environmental damage would be largely avoided.
"This is clearly an environmental catastrophe," Hayward said. "There's no two ways about it. . . . It's clear we are dealing with a very significant environmental crisis and catastrophe."
Hayward said on CBS that the top kill effort was proceeding as planned and that BP engineers completed a second phase early Friday by pumping "loss-control material" into the failed blowout preventer on top of the well. Called the "junk shot," that method involves putting material of various sizes -- including golf balls, tires and other debris -- into the blowout preventer to form a "bridge" against which to pump in more heavy mud, eventually plugging the well so that it could be sealed with cement.
