Here’s a live feed of the Gulf Oil spill via BP:
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UPDATE: What you will likely be watching when you look at this video is a major effort to plug the destructive leak. Reuters:
BP Plc’s chief executive said a difficult deep-sea operation to plug a gushing oil well was proceeding as planned on Wednesday and the next 24 hours will determine the energy giant’s success in stanching the leak deep on the Gulf of Mexico floor.
BP remained cautious about the outcome of the much anticipated “top kill” procedure, as did President Barack Obama, whose credibility stands to suffer if one of the country’s worst environmental catastrophes does not end soon.
But the fact that the London-based energy giant was able to launch the complex maneuver around midday and keep it on track in the first hours was a welcome respite from a string of failures and setbacks in the 37 days since a rig blast triggered the disaster.
Undersea robots were helping to inject heavy fluids and ultimately cement pumped down about a mile (1.6 km) to the sea-bed well, while BP chief executive Tony Hayward and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu monitored operations together in Houston.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.