Bad Weather Hampers Oil Skimming in the Gulf

Monday is day 70 of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. To get a sense of the challenge involved in trying to clean up all that oil, one has to head out to sea.

Gulf coast residents had feared a tropical storm. Monday's weather wasn't that bad, but it was bad enough to bring relief efforts on the water to a halt.

Seven miles out to sea there were rolling seven-foot seas. It makes the skimming operations to recover oil much more difficult.

Special Section: Gulf Coast Oil Disaster

"We put boom in water that actually collects the oil and then there's a siphon that pulls the oil from surface," said the Coast Guard's Robert Wagner.

"When you have any type of sea state it really kind of defeats that. One, the oil will go right over the boom itself and two, you're going get too much water and not oil to be able to collect," he said. "The further you get from the source, the more difficult it is." He added that the goal is to keep the oil from the beach.

Monday's foul weather also forced BP to delay plans of adding a third capturing system which would help the "Q-4000" and "Discover Enterprise" recover some of the 60,000 barrels of oil that continues to spew into the Gulf daily.

For the armada of boats dealing with the spill, tropical storm Alex is serving as a dress rehearsal of sorts for what is expected to be an intense hurricane season here on the gulf.

Nowhere is this being taken more seriously than in the spill zone where BP announced Monday that drilling for one of the relief wells has made it within 20 feet of the gushing well where plans are to pump heavy mud horizontally into the source to stop the constant flow.

Those relief wells are still expected to be completed by August. Until then combating the constant flow of oil is the Coast Guard's mission number one.

All of these tactics of all these years - these coast guard tactics in terms of search and rescue - are actually coming into play as you search and then find and then corral the oil out there.

"For 200 years we've been protecting America's maritime interests and we're not going to stop now," said Wagner.

Oil Spill's Economic Impact Mostly Local
BP's Gulf Hiring Creates Hostility