iqwsf

As Tropical Storm Bonnie dissipated to a mere area of low pressure over the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, a drilling rig and about a dozen other ships that had been working to repair BP’s blown-out oil well reversed course and began heading back to the well site. Workers scrambled on Friday to pack up their gear and move out of the storm’s projected path, after BP and the Coast Guard decided to suspend response operations. “We are going to continue to play a cat-and-mouse game,” Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who is leading the federal spill response, said at a briefing on Saturday. “It’s just one of the things we have to manage.” The drilling ship had sailed back to the well site by Saturday afternoon, and technicians were preparing to return to work. It will take at least a week before drilling can begin again on the relief well, which has been scheduled to be completed by mid-August. The relief well is considered likely to be the final plugging of the runaway well, which has been capped for over a week. Once the drilling rig sets a section of steel casing into the well bore of the relief well, BP has been given permission to start pumping heavy mud into the leaky oil reservoir with the hope of killing the well in early August, before the relief well 传奇私服 is complete. Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told reporters that the weakening storm system had produced modest waves of three to five feet in the area around the well and that the waves would grow only a bit more as it moved through. She expressed optimism that the system would dissipate the oil in the gulf, leading to faster biodegradation of it. “The beaches may look cleaner,” Ms. Lubchenco said. But she also cautioned that storm surges could push oil farther into some bayous and marshes. “Different shorelines will see different impacts from the storm.” Two ships operating underwater robots around the well never had to leave the area. But other ships may take longer than the drill ship to return because they took refuge up the Mississippi River.