Ships ready to leave leaky well as storm brews

[the white rabbit]

By HARRY WEBER and COLLEEN LONG, Associated Press Writers Harry Weber And Colleen Long, Associated Press Writers – 1 hr 45 mins ago
ON THE GULF OF MEXICO – Crew members aboard dozens of ships in the Gulf of Mexico prepared Thursday to evacuate as a tropical rainstorm brewing in the Caribbean brought the deep-sea effort to plug BP's ruptured oil well to a near standstill.

Though the rough weather was hundreds of miles from the spill site and wouldn't enter the Gulf for at least a few more days, officials ordered technicians trying to plug BP's well to stand down because they needed several days to clear the area.

Anxiety built among the 75-member crew aboard the cutter Decisive, the Coast Guard's primary search and rescue vessel that would be the last of about 65 ships to leave in the event of an evacuation.

"It's a controlled chaos out there," Lt. Patrick Montgomery told an Associated Press reporter aboard the cutter heading from Pascagoula, Miss., to the spill site.

Just days before the expected completion of a relief well designed to permanently throttle the free-flowing crude, the government's spill chief said Wednesday that work was suspended
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100722/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill

[the riot act]

BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - There will now be a slight intermission (pause) (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6766#more)

Posted by Heading Out on July 22, 2010 - 10:30am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: deepwater horizon, oil spill.

Note: Tropical storm update by Chuck Watson at the end of this post.

The approaching tropic system that has been mentioned in earlier posts has now not only caught the attention of the folks at the Deepwater well, but has moved them to action. Because of the length of time that it takes to disconnect the systems and then move the vessels out of harms way, BP decided to insert a storm packer, or plug, into the relief well and has gone ahead and put it into place. (From Kent Wells briefing on Wednesday afternoon.)

This will allow them to disconnect the drilling platform from the well and to move it out from the site if necessary. Before the rig could set the packer it had to withdraw all the drill pipe from the well, though it would use some of it to set the packer, which was put into the well 300 ft below the seabed.

The sequence of events that Mr Wells had defined, and which appears to have won the approval of the review panel and Admiral Allen, was that the relief well would have to be cased before the static kill of the well was attempted. There is a concern that, with the relief well only about 4 ft from the original well, in a condition where the relief well has only rock walls without a liner, the risk of possible wall failure in the relief well was too great.

More >> http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6766#more