BP pledges to pay for Gulf oil spill’s cleanup, damages; Obama wants more details on promise

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BP pledges to pay for spill’s cleanup, damages

VENICE, La. — BP PLC gave some assurance Monday to shrimpers, oil workers and scores of others that they will be paid for damage and injuries from the explosion of a drilling rig and the resulting massive oil spill in the Gulf.

A fact sheet on the company website says BP takes responsibility for cleaning up the spill and will pay compensation for “legitimate and objectively verifiable” claims for property damage, personal injury and commercial losses. President Barack Obama and several attorneys general have asked the company to explain what exactly that means.

BP spokesman David Nicholas said the company doesn’t know how much the cleanup will cost and hasn’t decided how to pay for it.

People like Dana Powell, manager of the Paradise Inn in Pensacola Beach, Fla., have feared what will happen to the Gulf Coast’s staple industries such as tourism and commercial fishing.

“Now when there’s a hurricane, we know it’s going to level things, devastate things, be a huge mess and it’s going to take several years to clean up,” she said. “But this? It’s going to kill the wildlife, it’s going to kill lifestyles — the shrimpers, the fishermen, tourism. Who’s going to come to an oil-covered beach?”

In the Chandeleur Sound on Monday, about 40 miles northeast of Venice, thick, heavy oil was slicked in long clumps that looked like raw sewage. Several sick and dying jellyfish could be seen in the water.

“This rain is mother ocean crying because of all this oil in her,” said charter boat captain Bob Kenney. “This is what makes me cry.”

Numerous dead turtles, fish and other wildlife have washed up on Gulf shores, though authorities have not yet confirmed that any of the animals died because of the spill. Procter & Gamble Co. says it has rushed 1,000 bottles of Dawn dishwashing liquid to the region to help clean any wildlife soiled by oil.

BP CEO Tony Hayward said Monday that the equipment that failed and led to the spill belonged to owner Transocean Ltd., not BP, which operated the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Guy Cantwell, a Transocean spokesman, responded by saying the company was waiting for all the facts before drawing conclusions.

A board investigating the explosion and oil leak plans to hold its first public hearing in roughly two weeks. The cause of the April 20 explosion, which killed 11 workers, has not been determined.

Meanwhile, BP officials are waiting for results on how effective it was using underwater robots to shoot chemicals directly into the leaking well, which are supposed to break down the oil and keep it from reaching the surface.

The update on the dispersants came as BP was preparing a system never tried to siphon away the spill of crude from a blown-out well a mile underwater. However, it will take at least another six days before crews can lower 74-ton concrete-and-metal boxes being built to capture the oil and siphon it to a barge waiting at the surface. The first of the boxes will be loaded onto a barge Tuesday to be taken to the well site.

That delay could allow at least another million gallons to spill into the Gulf, on top of the roughly 2.6 million or more that has spilled since the April 20 blast. Those numbers are based on the Coast Guard’s estimates that 200,000 gallons a day are spilling out, though officials have cautioned it’s impossible to know exactly how much is leaking.

By comparison, the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons off the Alaska coast in 1989.

Bad weather forced authorities to temporarily halt skimming oil by ship and dropping dispersants by air, although Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said skimming may resume Tuesday.

Everything engineers have tried so far has failed to stop the leak. After the explosion, the flow of oil should have been stopped by a blowout preventer, but the mechanism failed. Efforts to remotely activate it have proven fruitless.

BP has started drilling a second well to relieve pressure on the first, but oil could keep gushing for two to three months before it’s finished.

The drill will burrow down about 18,000 feet and inject heavy drilling fluid and then cement to stop the flow of oil, Suttles said at a news conference Monday.

Many coastal communities are desperate to keep the slick away from their beaches. One person had a suggestion at a BP town hall meeting held in Navarre, Fla., however.

“Would it be possible to just go out there and bomb the hell out of it?” said Kenny Wilder, 67, of Navarre.

Besides the immediate impact on Gulf industries, shipping along the Mississippi River could soon be limited because the slick was precariously close to a key shipping lane. Ships carrying food, oil, rubber and much more come through the Southwest Pass to enter the vital waterway.

Shipment delays — either because oil-splattered ships need to be cleaned off at sea before docking or because water lanes are shut down for a time — would raise the cost of transporting those goods.

“We saw that during Hurricane Katrina for a period of time — we saw some prices go up for food and other goods because they couldn’t move some fruit down the shipping channels and it got spoiled,” PFGBest analyst Phil Flynn said.

The Port of New Orleans said projections suggest the pass will be clear through Tuesday.

Obama toured the region Sunday, deflecting criticism that his administration was too slow to respond and did too little to stave off the catastrophe. The administration has also strongly defended any comparison to the slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The containment boxes being built were not part of BP’s original response plan. The approach has been used previously only for spills in relatively shallow water. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said engineers are still examining whether the valves and other systems that feed oil to a ship on the surface can withstand the extra pressures of the deep.

BP was trying to cap the smallest of three leaks with underwater robots in the hope it will make it easier to place a single oil-siphoning container over the wreck. One of the robots cut the damaged end off a pipe at the smallest leak Sunday and officials were hoping to cap it with a sleeve and valve sometime Monday, Suttles said.

A company official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the volume of reserves, confirmed reports that tens of millions of barrels of oil were beneath the seabed being tapped by the rig when it blew up. Bob Fryar, senior vice president for BP in Angola, said any numbers being thrown out are just estimates at best.

On Sunday, fishermen from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle got the news that more than 6,800 square miles of federal fishing areas were closed, fracturing their livelihood for at least 10 days and likely more just as the prime spring season was kicking in.

Peter Young has worked nearly 18 years as a fishing guide and said he’s afraid his way of life may be slipping away. The government has overreacted by shutting down vital fishing areas in the marshes, he said.

Until he sees oil himself, Young will keep fishing the closed areas.

“They can take me to jail,” he said. “This is our livelihood. I’m not going to take customers into oil, but until I see it, I can’t sit home and not work.”

Associated Press writers Harry R. Weber, Jay Reeves, Mike Graczyk, Tamara Lush, Brian Skoloff, Melissa Nelson, Mary Foster, Chris Kahn, Vicki Smith, John Flesher, Allen G. Breed and AP Photographer Dave Martin contributed to this report.