Scientists declared the 5-week-old BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico to be the worst in U.S. history on Thursday, while federal and oil industry officials capped a day of confusion by announcing they had suspended and then restarted their mud-pumping ``top kill.'' A 10-hour burst of 15,000 barrels of mud on Wednesday slowed the spill, said BP's Doug Suttles. But engineers suspended the process to replenish the mud and review their procedures. Thursday night's resumption might be followed with a ``junk shot'' of ``plating materials'' and ``dense rubber balls'' to plug the leak.
The news came on a day of grim news and conflicting reports about the latest effort to end the catastrophic oil spill. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen stirred confusion in a series of remarks that reported ``the mud was suppressing the hydrocarbons,'' meaning the oil and gas leak, but failed to mention that the so-called top kill was suspended. Then U.S. Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt disclosed a new series of studies that found the leak was a magnitude of two to five times larger than initial estimates -- and eclipsed the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska. One team estimated the rate of release at between 12,000 and 19,000 barrels per day. Another team using different methods found the range could have been up to 25,000, she said.
More possible bad news came from the University of South Florida College of Marine Science in St. Petersburg, which said its research vessel Weatherbird II had detected a disturbing find: a massive new plume in the deep recesses of the gulf spreading northeast toward the continental shelf. More tests would determine if it was contamination from the oil spill heading in a new direction -- toward Mobile Bay, Ala. President Barack Obama addressed the nation Thursday, saying there were no guarantees of success in the latest effort to stem the leak ``a mile under the surface where no human being can go.''
Meantime, Elizabeth Birnbaum, head of the U.S. Minerals Management Service inside the Interior Department for less than a year, resigned after days of blistering criticism over the federal government's lax oversight of BP and the rest of the offshore oil industry. Obama said his administration had inherited a Minerals Management Service ``that had been plagued by corruption for years.'' Investigators, he said, had uncovered a ``scandalously close relationship'' between federal regulators and the oil industry.
