Michael DeMocker / The Times-PicayunePresident Barack Obama talks with local fishermen about the federal response to the BP oil spill disaster during a visit to Venice, La., on May 2.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill hasn’t stained President Barack Obama nor dimmed the public’s desire for offshore energy drilling, according to a new Associated Press-GfK Poll.

While some conservative pundits, such as Rush Limbaugh, have called this “Obama’s Katrina,” that’s not how the public feels, the poll found. BP PLC, which owned the well that has gushed more than 4 million gallons since an April 20 oil rig explosion, is getting more of the public’s ire.

More people surveyed said they approved of Obama’s handling of the ongoing oil spill than disapproved, but not by large margins or with unusually strong feelings. It contrasts with the public’s reaction to President George W. Bush’s response to another Gulf disaster, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

The poll found that 42 percent approve of Obama’s actions, 33 percent disapprove and 21 percent say they have neutral feelings about his response.

The reaction is strongly along partisan lines. Democrats lean toward favoring Obama’s actions, 58 percent to 19 percent, with 17 percent expressing neither approval nor disapproval. By 47 percent to 27 percent, Republicans disapprove of Obama’s reaction, with 23 percent saying neither. Independents are about evenly split between approval and disapproval.

Democrat Eduardo Martinez, 38, of West Chester, Pennsylvania, said, “I’ve actually been impressed; they’ve put pressure on the private sector.”

But Republican Jeff Gerow, 52, of Boca Raton, Florida., said, “Just as I thought Bush was too slow to do anything with Katrina, even though I’m a Republican, I think he (Obama) could have done more with those folks.”

For Bush after Katrina, the public was harsher in its assessment. An AP-Ipsos poll in mid-September 2005 showed Bush’s approval rating somewhat lower in the weeks following the Katrina disaster than Obama’s rating for handling the current crisis. Back then, 35 percent approved of Bush’s handling of the disaster and 42 percent disapproved, with 25 percent expressing neither approval nor disapproval.

The telephone poll of 1,002 adults for the latest survey was conducted for The Associated Press by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media on May 7-11. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.

Even though BP got lower ratings than the president, it wasn’t too bad for the company formerly known as British Petroleum. Of those polled, 49 percent disapprove of BP’s actions, 32 percent approve and 15 percent express neither approval nor disapproval. But the feelings about BP were much stronger on the negative end, with 32 percent strongly disapproving of its actions compared with 6 percent who strongly approve.

The poll also found that the public still supports the idea of drilling offshore for oil and gas. By 50 percent to 38 percent, more people favor increased coastal drilling for oil and gas than oppose it.

While Republicans favor it by a 3-to-1 margin, Democrats lean toward opposing it, 52 percent to 36 percent. Independents are about evenly split. Groups giving drilling the strongest support include men, middle-aged and older people, whites and residents of rural and suburban areas.

The country is split about evenly over which priority is more important in considering drilling, with 49 percent choosing the need for the U.S. to provide its own energy and 47 percent picking protection of the environment.

Democrats prefer environmental protection by 62 percent to 35 percent. Republicans lean the other way, favoring the need for U.S. energy independence by 68 percent to 28 percent. Independents are about evenly split.

“We need to drill here, our economy needs it, but we also need to save the environment,” said Ryan Hart, 42, of Auburn, Maine, who considers himself politically independent.

Before the April 20 rig accident that triggered the spill, efforts to increase drilling offshore — which had used the slogan “drill, baby, drill” — had a major victory when the Democratic president partly lifted bans on drilling off many coastal areas.

A Pew Research Center poll in April 2009 found that by 68 percent to 27 percent, people favored “more offshore oil and gas drilling in U.S. waters.” That polling did not have the same questions as this one.

H. JOSEF HEBERT and HARRY R. WEBER
Associated Press Writers

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Lamar McKay, president and chairman of BP America, attend a hearing Tuesday of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in Washington.

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO (AP) — BP says a second, smaller container has reached the seafloor, but it hasn’t yet been placed over the blown-out well fouling the Gulf of Mexico.

BP spokesman Bill Salvin said Wednesday that the 2-ton box had reached the seabed overnight.

He says it hasn’t been positioned over the well yet because engineers want to make sure everything is hooked up correctly. Officials want to avoid the same icy, slushy buildup that thwarted their first attempt at using a much larger box that weighed about 100 tons.

This box will be connected to a ship on the surface by a pipe-within-a-pipe when it’s lowered. Crews plan to pump in heated water and methanol so ice won’t build up.

Salvin says undersea robots will position the box over the gusher by Thursday.

BP plans this week to deploy a 4-foot-diameter containment dome to try to contain some of the oil gushing from a damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico, BP CEO Tony Hayward said Monday.

In a conference call with reporters, Hayward said the new dome, known as an almost two-ton “top hat,” will take at least 72 hours to put in place.

The smaller dome, which is 5 feet tall, is being used instead of the 40-foot-tall, almost 100-ton concrete-and-steel containment chamber that the company tried to use Friday. Slushlike ice crystals known as hydrates clogged the larger chamber, as well as making it more buoyant and unstable, when BP tried to lower it over the damaged well.

“We’ve gone from one extreme to another,” Hayward said.

The smaller chamber should have less water flow, and BP plans to inject methanol and heated water into it as it’s being lowered. Those factors should limit the buildup of crystals, Hayward said.

The large chamber was supposed to control about 85 percent of the well’s leakage. Hayward said he’s not sure how much the smaller chamber will divert, but added that over time, the company should be able to increase the amount of oil captured.

In a later news conference, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said the smaller chamber should be able to contain an amount of oil similar to what the large one was designed to handle.

“The ‘top hat’ is in Fourchon being modified, and we hope to install it before the end of the week,” Suttles said.

Company officials also say they are moving forward with a separate effort, in a different location, to plug the well by filling it with shredded materials, such as golf balls, pieces of tires and knotted rope. The method is known as a “top kill” or a “junk shot.”

Suttles said that should take 10 to 14 days to try out.

A BP senior vice president, Kent Wells, said the company should be able to shoot those materials repeatedly into existing pipes located in the blowout preventer connected to the well head. The idea is to stop the flow and then plug it with mud and eventually with concrete. He said the company will be working on that solution simultaneously with the “top hat” effort.

The oil company had held off trying the “junk shot” for fear of making the leak worse but has determined it has a good chance of working, Wells said, though there’s still uncertainty.

The technique has been used all over the world, including on burning oil wells after the Persian Gulf War, he said.

“But it’s never been used at 5,000 feet underwater,” Wells said.

Meanwhile, nearby workers are drilling a relief well that, if all else fails, could stop the leak but is estimated to take three months to complete.

BP’s Hayward said a second relief well is also just getting under way and is being built in case the first relief well fails.

Over the past few days, forecasts of where the oil is heading have been broadened to shoreline west of the Mississippi River.

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said Monday that she had no new reports of oil reaching beaches.

Near Grand Isle on Monday, Blackhawk helicopters flown by the Louisiana National Guard airlifted huge sandbags from Port Fourchon to close cuts — or gaps — in Fourchon Beach that could allow oil into the interior marsh of the Barataria Basin.

Chett Chiasson, executive director of Greater Lafourche Port Commission, said the state and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acted quickly to allow the work to begin Monday morning.

Helicopters are dropping the several-thousand-pound sandbags into five cuts in the beach that range from 20 feet to 200 feet wide, he said.

Another cut — about 700 feet wide, near Elmer’s Island — is being filled in by the Guard on the ground using trucks.

Chuckie Cheramie, a port commissioner, said the sandbags will work much better in the cuts than would the booms being used elsewhere. Waves rolling through the cuts would go over the tops of booms, he said.

Windell Curole, general manager of the South Lafourche Levee District, said the sandbags aren’t being used in the marsh but are a relatively easy fix for the beach areas.

Another part of the plan is to use boom to connect the Lafourche ridge — located south of the Golden Meadow lock — with the Terrebonne Ridge farther to the west, he said.

During a news conference Monday at Port Fourchon, Gov. Bobby Jindal said the state was meeting with the Corps of Engineers to discuss using dredges to build up barrier islands and other protective structures.

In another attempt to keep the oil at bay, state officials Monday fully opened the Davis Pond diversion. The coastal restoration project — just west of New Orleans — draws sediment-laden freshwater from the Mississippi River and sends it toward the Barataria marshes.

The Davis Pond structure is now pushing 10,650 cubic feet per second of river water toward the coast. The Louisiana Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration hopes that will create an outward flow of water in the Grand Isle area.

Davis Pond is one of six diversions being used to try to keep the oil out of Louisiana’s estuaries and interior marshes. Officials hope rising water levels on the Mississippi will boost the effort.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts the oil is spreading steadily west of the Mississippi River, which could endanger Grand Isle. The oil is expected to reach even farther west to areas including Atchafalaya Bay, NOAA said.

Oil is spewing at an estimated rate of 210,000 gallons per day from the BP-leased well 5,000 feet below the surface.

The oil is pouring from the damaged riser pipe that was connected to the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. The rig sank two days later.

When the rig toppled, the 5,000-foot riser broke away from the rig and landed on the ocean floor. BP has said about 85 percent of the oil is coming from one of two leaks located near the end of the collapsed riser pipe.

Feb 26, 2009, Santa Rosa, Ecuador — A rupture in Ecuador’s second-largest oil pipeline polluted the Santa Rosa river in the Amazon jungle, pouring 14,000 barrels of crude oil into the river.

June 3, 1979, Bay of Campeche off Ciudad del Carmen, Mexico. By the time the 2-mile-deep well Ixtoc I was capped in March 1980 (nine months) about

3.3 million barrels of oil had spilled into the bay. The Ixtoc I spill is No. 2 on the list of largest oil spills of all time. (NOAA)

Never heard of them? Probably not. Foreign oil spills aren’t subject to the U.S. press corps, cable news or U.S. regulations governing crude oil.

So if an oil spill is out of sight of the media, was there a spill?

Protestors are saying “I told you so” and “stop drilling off our coast” with regards to BP’s tragedy. Oil spills know no political boundaries. If a spill of this size happened off the coast of Cuba or Mexico and headed for Miami or Galveston, it would be just as dangerous to our Gulf Coast as this spill.

The oil companies are among the most heavily regulated industries in the U.S. today.

The operators of production platforms and people manning the rigs receive intense training. Yearly, in many cases. This training focuses on environmental stewardship, well control, as well as production safety systems training.

An oilfield worker uses instruments out of a science lab and can tell you the parts per million of oil his overboard water has.

Can you find the federal regulations which govern your workplace? An oilfield worker can. He can find answers in Title 30 Code of Federal Regulations 250 almost as fast as you can order pizza on your iPhone.

The modern oilfield worker is trained to recognize dangers, follow safe work procedures and challenge what he perceives as bad practices.

He won’t just follow blindly. He knows he’s accountable to the law and considers the consequences of his actions.

U.S. offshore oil is under the jurisdiction of Department of the Interior. The actual representatives doing inspections are the Minerals Management Service.

The MMS, as we call them, come out at least annually to do facility inspections. They also do unannounced inspections. It’s their job to make sure that we are running our structures right. These inspectors are oil field hands themselves and know how a platform is supposed to run.

Their job’s to make sure our platforms are safe, don’t pose any threat to us or the environment. And that we’re good stewards of these natural resources.

The MMS also inspects drilling rigs. It generally inspects the rigs more frequently because of the activities. These inspectors are former rig hands and know their stuff also.

Remember China toys loaded with lead?

These manufactures promised they’d self regulate and obey U.S. regulations.

So do we really want to stop U.S. companies from drilling off our coast? You try and anticipate every contingency. Sometimes the unforeseen happens.

Let’s find out what happened, fix the problem, learn from it, repair the damage and move forward. America still needs America’s oil.

Charles Larriviere is an instructor for a major oil company. He is a lifelong resident of the area and has lived in Scott 30 years.

Original Article

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO — A day after icy slush clogged the massive box they hoped would contain an out-of-control oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, BP officials on Sunday said they may try again — this time with a smaller box.

They also were considering several other options to stop the daily rush of at least 200,000 gallons of crude, which began washing up on beaches in thick blobs over the weekend.

With crippled equipment littering the ocean floor, oil company engineers scrambled to devise a fresh method to cap the ruptured well. Their previous best hope for containing the leak quickly, a four-story containment box, became encrusted with deep-sea crystals Saturday and had to be cast aside.

Among the plans under consideration:

-Deploying a new, smaller containment box in the hope that it would be less likely to get clogged. Officials said the new box could be in place by midweek.”We’re going to pursue the first option that’s available to us and we think it’ll be the top hat,” the smaller box, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said.

-Cutting the riser pipe, which extends from the mile-deep well, undersea and using larger piping to bring the gushing oil to a drill ship on the surface, a tactic considered difficult and less desirable because it will increase the flow of oil.

-Shooting mud and concrete directly into the well’s blowout preventer, a device that was supposed to shut off the flow of oil after a deadly April 20 oil rig explosion but failed. The technique, known as a “top kill,” is supposed to plug up the well and would take two to three week.

-Try again using the containment box that failed to work Saturday after finding a way to keep the crystals from building up.The engineers appear to be “trying anything people can think of” to stop the leak, said Ed Overton, a LSU professor of environmental studies.

“Hopefully these are low-risk type of operations,” he said. “We don’t want to do anything to make it flow more.”

An estimated 3.5 million gallons of oil have spilled since the explosion. At that pace, the spill would surpass the 11 million gallons spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster by next month. BP is drilling a relief well that is considered a permanent fix, but that will take several weeks to complete.

BP PLC spokesman Mark Proegler said no decisions have been made on what step the company will take next. A decision could come as early as Monday.Philip Johnson, a petroleum engineering professor at the University of Alabama, said cutting the riser pipe and slipping a larger pipe over the cut end could conceivably divert the flow of oil to the surface.

“That’s a very tempting option,” he said. “The risk is when you cut the pipe, the flow is going to increase. … That’s a scary option, but there’s still a reasonable chance they could pull this off.”

Johnson was less optimistic that a smaller containment box would be less susceptible to being clogged by icelike crystals.

“My suspicion is that it’s likely to freeze up anyway,” he said. “But I think they should be trying everything they can.”

There was a renewed sense of urgency as dime- to golfball-sized balls of tar washed up Saturday on Dauphin Island, three miles off the Alabama mainland at the mouth of Mobile Bay and much farther east than the thin, rainbow sheens that have arrived sporadically in the Louisiana marshes. Until Saturday none of the thick sludge — those indelible images from the Valdez and other spills — had reached shore.