gulf of mexico oil spill
Day 50: Latest oil spill developments

This is CNN's round up of developments followed by stories of the major developments in one of our worst environmental disasters

(updated at 4:42 a.m.) Here are the latest developments on the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig.

NEW

– Frustrated advocacy group to hold nationwide vigils Tuesday night

– President Obama delivers strong defense of his administration's response to the spill stating he has held meetings with experts and has learned "whose ass to kick."

– The president is also endorsing plans to lift the cap on damages that oil companies must pay for a spill, currently set at $75 million.

– Gulf oil disaster will be felt for years, said Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen. "Long-term issues of restoring the environment and the habitats and stuff will be years," Allen said.

CLEANUP

– Workers in Louisiana have built about 2 miles of sand berms along the state's coast, Gov. Bobby Jindal said.

– BP Managing Director Bob Dudley said the company has agreed to pay $360 million toward the berm project, which is aimed at raising walls of sand along Louisiana barrier islands to catch the oncoming slick.

– BP says that it has closed one of four valves on the top of the cap and that the process is working well. The company says it may not close all four of the valves because engineers think the valves may be releasing more gas than oil.

– Federal authorities reopened about 340 square miles of federal waters off the Florida Panhandle east of Destin to fishing Monday after finding no sign of oil in that area, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration announced.

– The federal government has accepted Canada's offer of 3,000 meters - or more than 9,800 feet - of ocean boom to help combat the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a State Department spokesman said Monday. The boom is expected to arrive in the Gulf on Tuesday.

– The total amount of crude being collected from the ruptured undersea well responsible for the Gulf oil disaster increased Sunday to roughly 466,000 gallons, or 11,100 barrels, according to estimates from BP and Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the federal government's response manager for the spill. On Saturday, BP indicated that it had increased the amount of crude being funneled to the surface to roughly 441,000 gallons.

– Since the containment cap was installed Friday, the total number of gallons of oil being captured on a daily basis has nearly doubled, Allen said at the White House on Monday.

– BP "anticipates moving another craft" to the well site shortly in order to raise the capacity of oil that could be captured on a daily basis to roughly 840,000 gallons, or 20,000 barrels, Allen said.

– In advance of approaching oil, Florida has about 250,000 feet of boom spread around the Panhandle and has another 250,000 feet available, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said.

– Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said that barely any oil had appeared on the state's shores but that its tourist industry was nonetheless feeling the pinch because of "misperceptions."

POLITICS

– Sen. David Vitter, R-Louisiana, asked that the moratorium on deepwater drilling be lifted early.

– Allen briefed President Obama and the Cabinet on Monday on the administration's ongoing response to the incident.

– Obama plans to personally offer his condolences to families who lost loved ones in the rig explosion, said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. The president has invited the families of the 11 dead workers to the White House on Thursday.

– The widows of two men killed aboard the offshore drill rig that sank in April, ripping open the undersea gusher, told members of Congress that more needs to be done to keep oil companies from putting profits ahead of safety.

BP buys Google, Yahoo search words to keep people away from real news on Gulf oil spill disaster

In their most tenacious effort to control the ‘spin’ on the worst oil spill disaster in the history, BP has purchased top internet search engine words so they can re-direct people away from real news on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

In their most tenacious effort to control the ‘spin’ on the worst oil spill disaster in the history, BP has purchased top internet search engine words so they can re-direct people away from real news on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

BP spokesman Toby Odone confirmed to ABC News that the oil giant had in fact bought internet search terms. So now when someone searches the words ‘oil spill’, on the internet, the top link will re-direct them to BP’s official company website.

This would not be the first time that BP has tried to control information to protect the company’s public image.

Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, BP executives quickly underestimated the size of the disastrous oil spill. Some suggest they did it to avoid costly EPA per-gallon spill fines. The less oil spilled, the lower the fines.

A month into the spill, the public learned through independent science, that the spill was in fact a million gallon a day gusher. BP got caught in their own lie when the used a syphon pipe in one of the broken riser pipes and proudly proclaimed that they were capturing 5,000 barrels of oil a day. With the oil obviously still gushing, they had to up their spill rate to explain the reported discrepancy in their earlier estimates. More

BP's Deepwater Horizon costs hit $1.25bn

• Efforts to stop leak, clean-up costs and compensation costing tens of millions a day
• BP shares rise 2.7% this morning on hopes for success and dividend pledge
• Chief executive vows to spend 'what it takes' to fix spill

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has now cost BP $1.25bn (£870m), as its much-criticised chief executive vows to spend "what it takes" to fix the Deepwater Horizon disaster that has caused growing anger across America.

The energy company continues to spend tens of millions of dollars a day trying to stop the leak, mopping up oil on the surface, and compensating some of the people affected by the spill. It has also been instructed by the US coastguard to pay the $360m cost of building six sand booms off Louisiana to divert oil from the coastline, taking its committed spending over the $1.6bn mark.

BP continues to insist that it can fix America's worst ever environmental disaster. Tony Hayward, BP's embattled chief executive, tweeted on Twitter this morning that "Our top priority is the Gulf. I will not be diverted away from that. We will spend what it takes to make it right."

Hayward, who was dubbed "the most hated – and most clueless – man in America" last week, is handing responsibility for running the clean-up operation to its American director, Bob Dudley. This may assuage some of the fury vented at the British company, which faces calls for its US assets to be seized.

Although BP is now managing to collect some of the leaking oil through the containment cap it installed last week, the spill is expected to continue until August when relief wells have been drilled. More

Gulf oil spill: Containment cap working well so far, says BP

• Experts say it is catching 10,000 barrels every day
• Two relief wells drilled to block oil with heavy mud

Engineers trying to contain the oil spill from the stricken BP Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico have expressed optimism over the "containment cap" placed over the broken well, although it remains uncertain just how effective the method will be in capturing all of the oil.

Latest estimates released today suggest that about 10,000 barrels of oil a day are being caught in the device that was placed over the leaking pipe using remotely operated equipment. The oil is being collected in the funnel-like cap and then ushered up to the surface, where it is collected in a tanker called the Discoverer Enterprise sitting above the wellhead.

In a familiar pattern in the crisis, now in its 48th day, a notably more upbeat impression of the containment operation was given by BP than by the US government. BP's chief executive Tony Hayward told the BBC that, once the production flow was up to full speed, he would expect the proportion captured "to be the majority, probably the vast majority of the oil".

But Thad Allen, the US coastguard admiral who is co-ordinating the response of government agencies in the Gulf, gave a much more cautious assessment. He told Face the Nation on CBS: "I'm hoping we catch as much oil as we can, but I'm withholding any comment until production is at a full rate." More

U.S. Opens Criminal Inquiry Into Oil Spill
By HELENE COOPER and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Tuesday that it had begun civil and criminal investigations into the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, as the deepening crisis threatened to define President Obama’s second year in office.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in New Orleans that he planned to “prosecute to the fullest extent of the law” any person or entity that the Justice Department determines has broken the law in connection with the oil spill. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 120 points shortly after Mr. Holder’s announcement as energy stocks tumbled on expectations of the federal investigations. BP lost 15 percent of its market value during the day’s trading.

BP and government officials said flatly for the first time that they had abandoned any further plans to try to plug the well, and would instead try to siphon the leaking oil and gas to the surface until relief wells can stop the flow, most likely not before August.

Mr. Holder’s comments, which echoed those of Mr. Obama earlier in the day in the Rose Garden, reflected deepening frustration within the administration at the inability to stop the spill, along with wide concern that the government and the president appear increasingly impotent as oil laps at the shorelines of Louisiana, and now Alabama and Mississippi.

One person briefed on the inquiry said it was in an early stage and that no subpoenas had been issued yet to BP, the owner of the well. It was unclear whether any had gone to Trans ocean, which leased the Deepwater Horizon, the nine-year-old drilling rig that exploded and sank in April, to BP; Cameron, the company that manufactured a “blow out preventer” that failed to function after the explosion; or Halliburton, which performed drilling services like cementing.

Administration officials said they were reviewing violations of the Clean Water Act, which carries criminal and civil penalties and fines; the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which can be used to hold parties responsible for cleanup costs; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act, which provide penalties for injury and death of wildlife.More

Deep Underwater, Oil Threatens Reefs
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

Last September, marine scientists studying deep-sea biology in the northern Gulf of Mexico lowered a submersible robot off the side of a government research vessel and piloted it 1,300 feet to the ocean floor.

There, in complete darkness and near-freezing temperatures, the robot’s lights revealed a thriving colony of corals, anemones, fish, crustaceans and other sea life rivaling that of any shallow-water reef in the world. Researchers onboard were elated.

“We flipped on the lights, and there was one of the largest coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico sitting right in front of us,” said Erik Cordes, a marine biologist at Temple University and chief scientist on the vessel, the Ronald H. Brown.

Nine months later, the warm thrill of discovery has cooled into dread. The reef lies just 20 miles northeast of BP’s blown-out well, making it one of at least three extensive deepwater reefs lying directly beneath the oil slick in the gulf.

Yet it is not the slick that troubles scientists. They fear a more insidious threat: vast plumes of partly dissolved oil apparently spreading in the deep ocean.

The latest research team in the gulf to detect these plumes observed one extending roughly 22 miles northeast of the well site, in the vicinity of at least two major deepwater reefs, including the one discovered last fall. Preliminary images of the plume show layers of it touching the sea floor. Marine scientists have no firm grasp yet on what the impact on the corals will be, but they are bracing for catastrophe.

“The worst-case scenario is that there’s oil coating some of the corals,” Dr. Cordes said. “It would basically suffocate them.” More

Here is a link to a video featuring Philippe Cousteau Jr, showing you what the oil looks like underwater. This is what BP does not want you to see.

Hurricane Season Raises New Fears
By KENNETH CHANG

As oil continues to gush from a broken well into the Gulf of Mexico, officials and scientists are worrying that the environmental disaster could be compounded later this year by a natural one.

The hurricane season starts Tuesday and runs through November, and forecasters expect one of the most turbulent seasons ever. If a hurricane rolled over the spill, the winds and storm surges could disperse the oil over a wider area and push it far inland, damaging the fragile marshlands.

“It would very definitely turn an environmental disaster into an unprecedented environmental catastrophe,” said Brian D. McNoldy, a tropical storms researcher at Colorado State University.

Specific predictions are impossible to make because the effects would depend on the path, strength and speed of a hurricane, as well as the size and location of the oil spill when the storm arrived.

Because of the counter clockwise rotation of hurricane winds, a storm passing to the west of the slick would tend to push the oil to the coast, while a storm passing to the east would drive the oil away from land.

The winds churn water down only a few hundred feet, so a hurricane would probably not have a major effect on the large plumes of oil believed to be accumulating deep underwater.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting 14 to 23 named storms this season, of which 8 to 14 will turn into hurricanes and 3 to 7 of those will grow into major hurricanes with sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour.

Last month, hurricane forecasters at Colorado State issued similar predictions: 15 named storms, 8 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes.

The Colorado State team, Philip J. Klotzbach and William M. Gray, said there was a 43 percent chance that at least one hurricane would make landfall in Louisiana this year, based on the higher number of storms and the historical pattern of hurricane paths. (The atmospheric administration does not predict where the hurricanes will head.)More