This is at best a temporary solution. The relief wells still are the primary solution to ending this environmental disaster.
The new cap is at best a temporary solution. Allen said engineers might reopen the seal and collect the flow of oil, though he noted that a new improved containment facility would reduce the amount of crude fouling the Gulf. “It remains likely that we will return to the containment process using this new stacking cap connected to the risers,” he said.
BP hopes it can prevent the flow of any more oil into the Gulf until it manages to intercept the well and seal it off permanently with heavy drilling mud and cement some time in August. Suttles told CNN the relief well was about 4ft away.
But the BP executive also acknowledged that the Gulf would be feeling the effects of the spill for some time – a thought voiced by several others. “This is like the very early stages of a bone marrow transplant,” Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who is leading a congressional investigation into the environmental effects of the spill told CNN. “There is still a possibility that the well cannot, in fact, take this pressure, but we are all hoping and praying that it will.”
Even if the well does hold, BP and the Obama administration acknowledge there will be tar balls washing up on the beaches of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida for months.
