The words at the title to this entry are those spoken by the Retired Admiral. Given the fact he was a pivotal person in all this, with the most insight to all aspects of the operation, I sincerely hope the government and military take him and his recommendations seriously.
Currently, the well is 'static,' which means, it is capped and filled. It is filled with 'heavy mud' to help stabilize the oil well.
Evidently, the relief well will be completed by Mid-August and a concrete fill will complete the closure of the Macondo well.
...BP pumped 2,000 barrels (84,000 gallons) of synthetic drilling mud (click title to entry - thank you) into the well, beginning Tuesday night. That column of mud – weighing 13 pounds a gallon – now sits atop the oil beneath it. The system is in a static state, meaning that the downward weight of the mud is counterbalancing the pressure of the oil pushing upward from the reservoir.
In other words, nothing is moving – the thing BP has been trying to achieve virtually from the moment in late April that it realized it had a mile-deep undersea oil geyser on its hands.
President Obama called it a "significant milestone."...
There is still a great deal of concern regarding the chemicals in the water column. There is a remarkable assessment of the dispersants in "Nature."
...For most of the day, the monitors showed little of interest. But towards the afternoon, when the instruments were passing through water about 1,000 metres deep, the fluorometer and transmissometer readings spiked. The team went on to track remnants of that signal for some 45 kilometres southwest of the wellhead, in a layer between about 1,000 metres and 1,400 metres deep. It took some time for researchers to make sense of the data, but all the signs suggested that a deep, hidden plume of oily water was spreading away from the gusher....
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100804/full/466680a.html
Senator Bill Nelson is one of the folks that are not happy with all the chemicals dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. I tend to agree that he has a reason to be worried about his state and we all have a reason to still be concerned regarding the Loop Current. I believe Senator Lautenberg is seeking new regulations regarding the oil dispersants.
BP's use of chemicals used to disperse some of the oil gushing from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico might have been a cure worse than the disease, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/03/1758437/nelson-blasts-use-of-chemicals.html
We are almost there.
