Day 26: BP fails to tame oil spill

Source: PressTV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=126706&sectionid=3510203


The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico enters its 26th day as BP's latest contraption to contain the crude gushing form a blown-up well hits a snag.

BP on Friday failed to insert a mile-long tube into the gushing pipe to siphon the oil to a tanker at the water's surface. The company now seeks new methods to reduce the growing calamity, the Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, people are growing ever more angry and frustrated on the coastal shores where a fishing ban is in place, according to CBS.

In Port Fourchon, La., southwest of New Orleans, many local fishermen are out of the water and are running out of patience. Their only hope for work now is being hired by for clean-up work but they are frustrated by BP's red-tape, a report by CBS said.

"BP did this," says one fisherman there. "They destroyed us."

Scientists, meanwhile, have made the worrisome announcement that they had detected huge plumes of oil lurking just beneath the surface of the sea to more than 4,000 feet deep.

"It could take years, possibly decades, for the system to recover from an infusion of this quantity of oil and gas," said Samantha Joye, a marine science professor at the University of Georgia, the BBC reported.

BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward sought to play down what threatens to become the worst environmental disaster in US history.

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total volume of water," Hayward was quoted as saying by the Guardian.