Coast Guard may start redeploying cleanup resources once Gulf well is killed permanently

Gulf cleanup will change once oil stops for good

NEW ORLEANS — The government’s point man for the Gulf spill met with coastal parish officials Thursday to talk about what’s next now that the oil has stopped flowing.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said crews are having trouble finding patches of the crude that had been washing up on beaches and coating delicate coastal wetlands since the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 people.

Though no one knows for sure how much oil might be lurking below the surface, most of what was coming ashore has broken up or been sucked up by skimming boats or burned.

“The oil that we do see is weathered, it is sheen,” Allen said.

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said as he arrived for the meeting at a downtown New Orleans office building that it’s clear the cleanup effort is being scaled back even though oil is still showing up on the coast.

He said his biggest fear is “they are going to start pulling back. They say they are not but already they have canceled catering contracts, they’ve stopped production of boom at factories.”

Nungesser said no BP spill cleanup efforts were going on in Plaquemines on Wednesday, though a parish crew was working.

“We continued to get slammed by the oil,” he said. “Once again, instead of having a seat at the table discussing it, they are pulling the rug from under us.”

Barring a calamity, the oil won’t start flowing again before BP PLC can permanently kill the well, which could happen as soon as mid-August. Allen said the Coast Guard expects oil to keep showing up on beaches four to six weeks after that happens.

In Orange Beach, Ala., Jack Raborn said he didn’t see any tar balls when he went to the shore Wednesday with friends and family. But when they entered the ocean, he said, the water was tainted.

“It feels like you’ve got diesel fuel on you. It’s sticky,” said Raborn, 49. “I was optimistic before today. I’m really disturbed by what I found once we got in the water.”

A report by the National Resources Defense Council found oil still fouling beaches even after the gusher was capped July 15. Since the spill started, beaches from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle have been closed or slapped with health warnings more than 2,200 times, the council found.

Allen said once oil stops for good, the Coast Guard may start redeploying some of the 11 million feet of boom, 811 oil skimmers and 40,000 people that have been part of the oil spill response. Many of the workers are fishermen who have lost their livelihoods because of the spill.

Allen said Wednesday that the temporary cap put on the busted well two weeks ago is holding firm. Before that, it spewed 94 million to 184 million gallons of oil.

Crews have also taken a crucial step toward readying the relief well they need to permanently stop the oil, removing a plug they had popped in to keep it safe ahead of Tropical Storm Bonnie, which passed through without doing major damage.

Now that the plug is out, the relief well must be flushed out with drilling mud before casing can be dropped in and cemented. All that should be done around Monday, Allen said, though he cautioned that was just an estimate.

Once everything is in place, crews will begin a procedure known as a static kill, pumping heavy mud straight down the well though the temporary cap and failed blowout preventer. If the well casing is intact, the mud will force the oil back down into the natural petroleum reservoir. Then workers will pump in cement to seal the casing.

The static kill is on track for completion some time next week. Then comes the “bottom kill,” where the relief well will be used to pump in mud and cement; that process will take days or weeks, depending on the success of the static kill.

Associated Press Writer Brian Skoloff contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS parish president’s first name to Billy.)