Oil Leak Container Touches Down on Seafloor

Updated at 9:43 p.m. ET

A BP-chartered vessel lowered a 100-ton concrete-and-steel vault onto a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, an important step in a delicate and unprecedented attempt to stop most of the gushing crude fouling the sea.

Underwater robots guided the 40-foot-tall box into place. Now that the contraption is on the seafloor, workers will need at least 12 hours to let it settle and make sure it's stable before the robots can hook up a pipe and hose that will funnel the oil up to a tanker.

Complete Coverage: Disaster in the Gulf

"It appears to be going exactly as we hoped," BP spokesman Bill Salvin told The Associated Press on Friday afternoon, shortly after the four-story device hit the seafloor. "Still lots of challenges ahead, but this is very good progress."

(Scroll down to watch "CBS Evening News" Anchor Katie Couric interview author and expert Mike Tidwell about the massive oil spill in the Gulf and its potential consequences to coastal communities.)

Once a hose is connected to siphon the box's contents to a ship on the water level, engineers have to separate the mix of oil, water and gas, a potentially explosive process, CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports from Venice, La.

By Sunday, the box the size of a house could be capturing up to 85 percent of the oil. So far about 3 million gallons have leaked in an environmental crisis that has been unfolding since a deepwater drilling platform exploded April 20, sending toxic oil toward a shoreline of marshes, shipping channels, fishing grounds and beaches. Eleven workers were killed in the accident.

The lowering of the containment device was a slow-moving drama playing out 50 miles from Louisiana's coast, requiring great precision and attention to detail. It took about two weeks to build the 40-foot box, and the effort to lower it by crane and cable to the seafloor began late Thursday night. After it hit bottom Friday afternoon, the crane gradually eased off to allow it to settle.

"We are essentially taking a four-story building and lowering it 5,000 feet and setting it on the head of a pin," Salvin said.

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The task became increasingly urgent as toxic oil crept deeper into the bays and marshes of the Mississippi Delta.

A sheen of oil began arriving on land last week, and crews have been putting out floating barriers, spraying chemical dispersants and setting fire to the slick to try to keep it from coming ashore. But now the thicker, stickier goo - arrayed in vivid, brick-colored ribbons - is drawing ever closer to Louisiana's coastal communities.

There are still untold risks and unknowns with the containment box: The approach has never been tried at such depths, where the water pressure is enough to crush a submarine, and any wrong move could damage the leaking pipe and make the problem worse. The seafloor is pitch black and the water murky, though lights on the robots illuminate the area where they are working.

If the box works, another one will be dropped onto a second, smaller leak at the bottom of the Gulf.

At the same time, crews are drilling sideways into the well in hopes of plugging it up with mud and concrete, and they are working on other ways to cap it.

The well has been spewing about 200,000 gallons a day in the nation's biggest oil spill since the nearly 11 million gallons lost in the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989.

The deadly blowout was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's internal investigation.

Investigators have been focusing on the so-called blowout preventer. Federal regulators told The Associated Press that they are going to examine whether these last-resort cutoff valves on offshore oil wells are reliable.

At Hopedale, a fishing community in St. Bernard Parish, La., that has been a staging area for efforts to protect inlets and bayous, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal stepped out of a helicopter and held aloft a tennis ball-size hunk of tarry oil he said a fisherman had retrieved near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Oil was reported moving west of the Mississippi toward fishing and resort villages on the Louisiana coast.

After a flyover, Jindal described the orange and brown goo surrounding Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands as resembling "a ring around your bathtub."

BP plans to sell the petroleum it recovers after separating out the large amounts of natural gas and seawater - something that industry experts said should not present much of a problem.

"That's something they do for every oil well," said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geoscience programs at the University of Houston. "They'll refine it and crack it and everything, and by the time it gets in your gas tank, you'll never even know it was in the water."

The oil's planned destination, BP's Texas City, Texas, refinery, has its own checkered history. An explosion there in 2005 killed 15 people and injured 170. Regulators last October hit BP with a record $87 million fine for safety violations.

@katiecouric: Oil Spill's Impact on Gulf Coast Wildlife


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[bajajohn1]

And now, ice has formed inside the box....what now brown cow?

[spaceatoms]

make a gigantic net instead of a box with hoses at multiple locations, think!

[csurfer]

Anyone operating such a business that has the potential of causing such wide devastation to the environment AND without --several-- working safe guards in place, or a worse case scenario backup plan, shouldn't just be fined, they should be jailed. I'm all for drill baby drill, but drill stupid drill is a different story.

I'm no expert on the subject of oil drilling, but it just seems to me drilling off shore at such depths versus drilling on land would scream out to me the need for multiple safe guards and an over the top emergency response plan. I wouldn't even think of starting such a business without knowing for sure I couldn't plug that well in an emergency. ESPECIALLY in this situation where it was common knowledge for the potential of a methane gas explosion. BP says they'll pay for the cleanup. What? not enough money to pay for the proper safeguards for an operation of this magnitude? Foolish and irresponsible.

[wjksea]

Interesting how this "blog" is now more hidden. For the fewer who will read it. Reports, not from mainstream media, are that it was like a war zone on the rig when it exploded. Men running in flames some missing limbs. The survivors were kept on the water for 15 hours. Once on land they were transported in private buses in the absence of reporters and taken to hotels where they were pressured, perhaps forced to sign statements to the benefit of the corporate dictatorship the people of these United States are enslaved under.

To the corporate attorneys, the top administrators and the greatest beneficiaries of these monstrous legal constructs known as corporations, you will find there are consequences for the way you have willfully chosen to live your short lives in the acquisition of earthly material wealth and power. Shock and Awe will be yours to face one day. Your dares upon justice to respond to your filth will be met with your deepest regrets of what you could have enjoyed if you had chosen what's good over what is evil.

There ain't no free lunch right? Earthly mortality awaits all but the pigs will inherit their eternal pig pen.

[cgirltruck]

I hope this works and we are able to hold this environment disaster from being as bad as it could have been. I am praying for all those that are affected by this.

[tmittelstaed]

"...As a Pensacola resident, I applaud the efforts of every person connected with the resolution of this environmental crisis..."

I doubt your a Pensacola resident, the residents there don't even know the meaning of the word "environment" much less how to spell it.

You and your fellow state residents inflicted George "environmental waster" Bush on our country, you have a lot of nerve now singing his opponents praises. He gutted every environmental law he could, then his hand-picked successor coined "drill babay drill". Thank God that white trash "thing" from AK never got near the Presidency.

"...I have changed my heart about oil companies..."

Oh baloney you have never met an oil company you disliked in your life.

"...I foresee BP's finest hour in the near future..."

Sure, when they pink-slip all the CEO's cronies who withheld adequate financing to do the drilling job right in the first place.

"...and trust that all parties will study and learn from this and employ more imagination going forward...."

You want imagination, I'll give you imagination. Here's some:

Imagine a USA that runs on an electric grid that heats and cools everyone's home, powers every commuter vehicle and rail car out there, generated by our 200+ year supply of coal, with the CO2 from that coal piped into huge algae farms that convert it into biomass that's then cracked down into biodiesel, which powers our trucking and freight hauling and farm machinery and plastics industry. And growing wind & solar generation capacity every year.

It's possible. Nothing I outlined here is scientifically impossible. And it would forever remove our dependency on big oil, and foreign terrorists. You want to see how to make oil out of algae:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/biofuel/4213775


"...We can't allow ourselves to discourage those who try..."

Tell that to your friends in the oil industry who have hamstrung every attempt at getting energy independent for the last 40 years.

BP isn't even an American company.

[stevex47]

Good luck and Godspeed !

[retm-w]

Let's just hope for everyone that's effected sake that this works. Enough of the negatives, let's think positive.

[sjc_1]

There seem to be few safety standards and even less oversight for deep water drilling. We need to learn the lessons, even if they are after the fact. It is better than learning no lessons at all.

[pensacola8-2009]

As a Pensacola resident, I applaud the efforts of every person connected with the resolution of this environmental crisis. I have changed my heart about oil companies and am inclined to respect them businesses with common values found in people. The Exxon Valdez was a different kind of crisis, but I was more inclined to believe this was becoming like another PEMEX Bay of Campeche crisis that I survived in 1979 in Corpus Christi.

It isn't over until it is over. I will cheer BP and lead others to encourage BP to work through this dilemma until it is finished. In many ways, I see this as BP's "Apollo 13" and I am hoping for a similar outcome, although loss of life has already occurred. I also concede that more oil rig workers are risking their lives to resolve this, and I openly admire them from the core of my heart.

I foresee BP's finest hour in the near future and trust that all parties will study and learn from this and employ more imagination going forward.

As for the political machine, enough has been said and it is appropriate to stop the negative rhetoric and instead begin to collect positive and supporting commentary that will encourage BP to rescue itself, the people of their company and the environment. We can't allow ourselves to discourage those who try.

[josephp5]

Hello, Mr. BP CEO. I didn't know you were a resident of Pensacola.