Unprecedented engineering feat to stop oil spill. Will it work?
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010Port Fourchon, Louisiana (CNN) — It sounds like a Hollywood movie. An impending disaster — think the disabled spacecraft in “Apollo 13″ or the asteroid hurtling toward Earth in “Armageddon” — prompts a daring intervention by engineers to save the day.
This time, the threat is oil gushing from a broken well on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico that could destroy livelihoods and irreplaceable coastal wetlands.
Equally real is the attempted engineering marvel — a four-story metal container that will be lowered onto the leaking pipe to try to suck in the flowing oil.
Officials of BP, the oil giant that owns the leaking well, said Monday they plan to try the unprecedented effort this week.
If successful, they say, the “pollution containment chamber” could reduce the underwater gusher by more than 80 percent and provide the first success in industry and government efforts to control the spill that began April 20 with an explosion and fire on an offshore rig.
“Everyone’s committed to getting this stopped so we can just focus on a cleanup,” said Doug Suttles, the BP chief operating officer.
