By Anna Driver and Michael Peltier
VENICE, La/PENSACOLA BEACH, Fla, June 5 (Reuters) - Efforts to siphon off oil and gas gushing from a ruptured deep-sea wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico are working, U.S officials said on Saturday, as President Barack Obama defended his handling of the environmental crisis.
After soiling wetland wildlife refuges in Louisiana and barrier islands in Mississippi and Alabama, the black tide of pollution has reached some of the famous white beaches of Florida, nicknamed the 'Sunshine State.'
The toll of dead and injured birds and marine animals, including sea turtles and dolphins, is climbing.
'No matter how many people we have out, we can never scour the coast well enough to find every single animal in time to save it,' said Sharon Taylor, a wildlife veterinarian with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, working at the Fort Jackson Wildlife Center in Buras, Louisiana.
But 47 days into the crisis and after several false starts, a partial solution finally appears at hand.
The small 'top hat' containment cap that British energy giant BP Plc clamped over the leak siphoned oil on Friday at a rate well above initial estimates, U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said at a briefing in Theodore, Alabama.
BP estimated Friday's collection at 6,077 barrels, and on its Twitter feed said that 'improvement in oil collection is expected over the next several days.'
The collection rate is still only about one-third of one day's flow from the oil geyser, which has been estimated by the government at about 19,000 barrels (800,000 gallons/3 million liters) per day.
But it was the first significant progress in the nearly seven-week-old drama that has captured the world's attention and forced the Obama administration to reconsider plans to expand offshore oil drilling as a way to reduce the U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
Allen said the full capacity of BP's containment device was 15,000 bpd, which he called the 'upper limit' of the current leak control effort. BP does not expect to fully halt the oil flow until August, when two relief wells are due to be completed.
He said that winds continue to push parts of the vast oil slick closer to the coastline across a wide area -- roughly from the Mississippi/Alabama border to Port St Joe in the Florida Panhandle, or more than 200 miles (320 kilometers).
Florida's fishermen got a glimmer of good news late on Friday when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reopened about 16,000 square miles (41,400 sq km) to fishing that had been closed on June 2 as a precaution.
Still, about 32 percent of Gulf federal waters, or 78,200 square miles (202,500 sq km), remains closed to fishing in waters off four states. The U.S. shrimp and oyster supply, in particular, is heavily concentrated in the Gulf.
Out-of-work fishermen aired their frustration with BP and the government at a free hamburger and hot dog lunch in Lafitte, Louisiana, on Friday.
'It's all up in the air right now,' said Jerry Perrin, who has harvested crabs and shrimp for 60 years off Louisiana. 'The government needs to start spending more money now.'
OBAMA'S TEST
Obama on Friday paid his third visit to the Gulf Coast since the April 20 oil rig blowout, which killed 11 workers. He faces criticism that the government has not moved aggressively enough to tackle the crisis.
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, Obama said his administration has put in place the largest response to an environmental disaster in U.S. history. The government had been 'mobilized on every front,' he said.
BP, meanwhile, delayed a decision on Friday to suspend an upcoming quarterly shareholder dividend worth over $2 billion, as some U.S. politicians have demanded.
The company faces a U.S. criminal probe, several lawsuits, dwindling investor confidence and growing questions about its credit-worthiness. Its share price has been stripped of about one-third of its value since the crisis began.
BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward insisted the company had plenty of money to meet its obligations, including $5 billion in cash and additional credit lines it could tap.
The company has said it had already spent $1 billion on the disaster, and the tab is rising.
BP is preparing to send a second advance payment to individuals and businesses along the Gulf Coast to compensate for the loss of income as a result of the spill. About 14,000 individuals and businesses in four states will have received about $84 million once the second payment is processed.
Neither Obama nor BP fared well in a new CBS public opinion poll on Friday that found an overwhelming majority of Americans believing that both the president and the company should be doing more to clean up the spill.
SUNSHINE STATE TARRED
The far-flung but fragmented oil slick appeared to make its first landfall in Florida on Friday as tar balls and oily sheen washed up on Pensacola Beach on the Panhandle.
Tar ball sightings were fewer on Saturday, but residents and environmental officials were still uneasy.
'BP can't stop it, I don't think the Navy or the military can stop it,' said local businessman Michael Penzone. 'If we can get people to come out and start praying, maybe something good can come out of this.'
Local officials are bracing for more impact from the spill on the state's $60 billion-a-year tourism industry.
Protesters planned an anti-BP rally for Sunday at a BP gas station in downtown Pensacola -- although such grass-roots actions are mostly seen as damaging to small business owners who run the stations, with little impact on the London-based corporation's revenues.
Latest figures from the U.S. government on Friday showed 527 birds across the Gulf Coast have been collected dead over a 45-day period, although not all showed signs of oil.
Tom Bancroft, chief scientist for the National Audubon Society, said the government's numbers tell only part of the story. 'Some (birds) just sink under the water and will never be counted,' he said.
Of particular concern, Bancroft said, are threatened shore birds that breed on Gulf Coast beaches like the Wilson's Plover. The spill could also be 'a really bad setback' for the brown pelican, Louisiana's state bird, which was only removed from the endangered species list in 2009.
NOAA reports many heavily oiled sea turtles in the spill area. The turtles are being caught, cleaned and transported to an Audubon Aquarium outside New Orleans for further care.
(Additional reporting by Chris Baltimore in Houston, Pascal Fletcher in Miami, Jeff Mason in Kenner, La., Kelli Dugan in Alabama, Sarah Irwin in Buras, Louisiana, and Jane Ross in Pensacola; Writing by Ros Krasny; Editing by Philip Barbara) Keywords: OIL SPILL/ (matt.bigg@thomsonreuters.com; +1 404 720-2891; Reuters Messaging: matt.bigg.reuter.com@reuters.net) COPYRIGHT Copyright Thomson Reuters 2010. All rights reserved. The copying, republication or redistribution of Reuters News Content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters.
VENICE, La/PENSACOLA BEACH, Fla, June 5 (Reuters) - Efforts to siphon off oil and gas gushing from a ruptured deep-sea wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico are working, U.S officials said on Saturday, as President Barack Obama defended his handling of the environmental crisis.
After soiling wetland wildlife refuges in Louisiana and barrier islands in Mississippi and Alabama, the black tide of pollution has reached some of the famous white beaches of Florida, nicknamed the 'Sunshine State.'
The toll of dead and injured birds and marine animals, including sea turtles and dolphins, is climbing.
'No matter how many people we have out, we can never scour the coast well enough to find every single animal in time to save it,' said Sharon Taylor, a wildlife veterinarian with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, working at the Fort Jackson Wildlife Center in Buras, Louisiana.
But 47 days into the crisis and after several false starts, a partial solution finally appears at hand.
The small 'top hat' containment cap that British energy giant BP Plc clamped over the leak siphoned oil on Friday at a rate well above initial estimates, U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said at a briefing in Theodore, Alabama.
BP estimated Friday's collection at 6,077 barrels, and on its Twitter feed said that 'improvement in oil collection is expected over the next several days.'
The collection rate is still only about one-third of one day's flow from the oil geyser, which has been estimated by the government at about 19,000 barrels (800,000 gallons/3 million liters) per day.
But it was the first significant progress in the nearly seven-week-old drama that has captured the world's attention and forced the Obama administration to reconsider plans to expand offshore oil drilling as a way to reduce the U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
Allen said the full capacity of BP's containment device was 15,000 bpd, which he called the 'upper limit' of the current leak control effort. BP does not expect to fully halt the oil flow until August, when two relief wells are due to be completed.
He said that winds continue to push parts of the vast oil slick closer to the coastline across a wide area -- roughly from the Mississippi/Alabama border to Port St Joe in the Florida Panhandle, or more than 200 miles (320 kilometers).
Florida's fishermen got a glimmer of good news late on Friday when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reopened about 16,000 square miles (41,400 sq km) to fishing that had been closed on June 2 as a precaution.
Still, about 32 percent of Gulf federal waters, or 78,200 square miles (202,500 sq km), remains closed to fishing in waters off four states. The U.S. shrimp and oyster supply, in particular, is heavily concentrated in the Gulf.
Out-of-work fishermen aired their frustration with BP and the government at a free hamburger and hot dog lunch in Lafitte, Louisiana, on Friday.
'It's all up in the air right now,' said Jerry Perrin, who has harvested crabs and shrimp for 60 years off Louisiana. 'The government needs to start spending more money now.'
OBAMA'S TEST
Obama on Friday paid his third visit to the Gulf Coast since the April 20 oil rig blowout, which killed 11 workers. He faces criticism that the government has not moved aggressively enough to tackle the crisis.
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, Obama said his administration has put in place the largest response to an environmental disaster in U.S. history. The government had been 'mobilized on every front,' he said.
BP, meanwhile, delayed a decision on Friday to suspend an upcoming quarterly shareholder dividend worth over $2 billion, as some U.S. politicians have demanded.
The company faces a U.S. criminal probe, several lawsuits, dwindling investor confidence and growing questions about its credit-worthiness. Its share price has been stripped of about one-third of its value since the crisis began.
BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward insisted the company had plenty of money to meet its obligations, including $5 billion in cash and additional credit lines it could tap.
The company has said it had already spent $1 billion on the disaster, and the tab is rising.
BP is preparing to send a second advance payment to individuals and businesses along the Gulf Coast to compensate for the loss of income as a result of the spill. About 14,000 individuals and businesses in four states will have received about $84 million once the second payment is processed.
Neither Obama nor BP fared well in a new CBS public opinion poll on Friday that found an overwhelming majority of Americans believing that both the president and the company should be doing more to clean up the spill.
SUNSHINE STATE TARRED
The far-flung but fragmented oil slick appeared to make its first landfall in Florida on Friday as tar balls and oily sheen washed up on Pensacola Beach on the Panhandle.
Tar ball sightings were fewer on Saturday, but residents and environmental officials were still uneasy.
'BP can't stop it, I don't think the Navy or the military can stop it,' said local businessman Michael Penzone. 'If we can get people to come out and start praying, maybe something good can come out of this.'
Local officials are bracing for more impact from the spill on the state's $60 billion-a-year tourism industry.
Protesters planned an anti-BP rally for Sunday at a BP gas station in downtown Pensacola -- although such grass-roots actions are mostly seen as damaging to small business owners who run the stations, with little impact on the London-based corporation's revenues.
Latest figures from the U.S. government on Friday showed 527 birds across the Gulf Coast have been collected dead over a 45-day period, although not all showed signs of oil.
Tom Bancroft, chief scientist for the National Audubon Society, said the government's numbers tell only part of the story. 'Some (birds) just sink under the water and will never be counted,' he said.
Of particular concern, Bancroft said, are threatened shore birds that breed on Gulf Coast beaches like the Wilson's Plover. The spill could also be 'a really bad setback' for the brown pelican, Louisiana's state bird, which was only removed from the endangered species list in 2009.
NOAA reports many heavily oiled sea turtles in the spill area. The turtles are being caught, cleaned and transported to an Audubon Aquarium outside New Orleans for further care.
(Additional reporting by Chris Baltimore in Houston, Pascal Fletcher in Miami, Jeff Mason in Kenner, La., Kelli Dugan in Alabama, Sarah Irwin in Buras, Louisiana, and Jane Ross in Pensacola; Writing by Ros Krasny; Editing by Philip Barbara) Keywords: OIL SPILL/ (matt.bigg@thomsonreuters.com; +1 404 720-2891; Reuters Messaging: matt.bigg.reuter.com@reuters.net) COPYRIGHT Copyright Thomson Reuters 2010. All rights reserved. The copying, republication or redistribution of Reuters News Content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters.