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Obama defends handling of gulf oil spill

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As BP continued its effort to gain control of its untamed deep-sea well, President Obama announced more restrictions on offshore oil drilling Thursday and insisted his administration is firmly in charge of the response to the spill, now believed to be the largest in U.S. history.

Batting away suggestions that the federal response has been lackluster and that BP executives have been calling some of the shots, Obama insisted that “BP is operating at our direction.”

“Every key decision and action they take must be approved by us in advance,” Obama said. If the Coast Guard orders BP to do something, he added, “they are legally bound to do it.”

More than 24 hours after BP began a crucial “top kill” effort to plug the deep-sea well with heavy drilling mud, company executives said the procedure was going as planned but they were not ready to declare success.

Although incident commander Adm. Thad Allen of the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday morning that BP had temporarily stopped the flow of oil, the company’s chief operating officer later said petroleum was still flowing. “Once the well has stopped flowing then we would pump cement down into the hole to fully seal it,” Doug Suttles said. “We might finish this in the next 24 hours, or it might take longer.” Engineers next plan to inject heavier “bridging material” above the mud to prepare to put a cement seal on the well.

The developments came on a day when a new spill estimate indicates that the BP leak is more than twice the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, making it the worst oil disaster in U.S. history.

As much as 29 million gallons of crude have poured into the gulf by those estimates, creating a toxic legacy that will linger for months and possibly years in waters that lap thousands of miles of shoreline and harbor some of the nation’s richest fisheries.

The head of the scandal-plagued federal agency that oversees oil and gas drilling resigned, and in Louisiana, testimonies from survivors of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion raised new questions about how crew members responded in the chaotic early minutes of the disaster.

The spill prompted the president to hold his first full-fledged news conference in months and to plan a Friday trip to the Gulf Coast to review the damage, his second to the region since the rig explosion, which killed 11 people.

In a White House news briefing, Obama called the five-week-old BP spill an “economic and environmental tragedy” and said he was frustrated and angry over its duration. Every morning when he’s finished shaving, he said, one of his daughters quizzes him: “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”

Obama announced drilling restrictions that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar later said amounted to hitting “the pause button on deep-water exploration.”

Salazar on Thursday ordered a sweeping moratorium on offshore lease sales and directed that all 33 exploratory rigs operating in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico be shut down as soon as possible.

The directive does not affect 591 deep-water and 4,515 shallow-water wells that are already producing oil or gas.

Salazar also put a hold, until 2011, on controversial drilling plans for the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Alaskan Arctic, where environmentalists fear a spill could be more disastrous than the gulf leak. Two additional lease sales will be canceled: one scheduled for August in the gulf and a 2012 lease sale off Virginia.

Obama blamed practices of the previous administration for poor regulation, citing a “cozy and sometimes corrupt relationship” between oil companies and federal regulators. He described as “appalling” the findings of a recently released Interior inspector general’s report that detailed ethical lapses in a Louisiana office of the Minerals Management Service, which oversees oil and gas operations.

Salazar has instituted changes since he became secretary, Obama said, but the “culture had not fully changed” within the agency at the time of the spill. “Absolutely, I take responsibility for that,” Obama said.

Thursday the director of Minerals Management Service, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned in a two-paragraph letter to Salazar. In a statement, Salazar called her “a strong and effective person and leader” and said she resigned “on her own terms and on her own volition.”

“She helped …us take important steps to fix a broken system,” he added. “She is a good public servant.”

Crew testimonies

As Capitol Hill lawmakers stepped up criticism of BP, workers testifying before an investigatory committee near New Orleans on Thursday raised questions about whether enough actions were taken to prevent the accident from reaching a crisis point.

The picture they painted suggested that the crew was lulled into routine just before the disaster. A key Transocean official was in the shower and apparently never heard early alarms. He had no thought of problems with the cement sealing the well, he said. “Everything was sorted out,” said the official, Jimmy Harrell, the rig’s offshore installation manager. The Deepwater Horizon rig was owned by Transocean Ltd.

Elsewhere on the rig that evening, the atmosphere was relaxed. Officials talked of the next well-drilling operation. A group of high-ranking BP officials were taking a tour and commended the crew on its safety record.

The gas surged up the well about 9:30 p.m. Some crew members apparently realized the well was out of control. But it was unclear what steps they took in this crucial period, which is the focus of elaborate training and preparation in the oil industry.

By the time Harrell made it to the control room and gave an order to activate an emergency system at 9:56 p.m., it was too late. Explosions had already rocked the rig, the power was out, flames had erupted and the control systems didn’t respond.

BP investigators have suggested that the possible failure of contracted workers to properly monitor the well and to respond adequately once it blew contributed to the ensuing fire, and unleashed the catastrophic oil spill. Others have pointed to BP’s engineering of the well.

Testimony before the Coast Guard committee suggested that the events aboard the Deepwater Horizon involved more than engineering choices.

Contradicting testimony from previous witnesses, Harrell denied that BP had tried to cut corners before the accident. He said there was no argument about pressure test results or potential leaks in the well before the blowout, as others have alleged.

Instead, Harrell said, he had discussions with BP officials about nitrogen used in cement. Harrell conceded that BP had at first not planned to conduct a “negative pressure test,” a measure taken to check for leaks, on the day of the accident. But he said a BP official then reversed himself, agreed to do the test, then ordered it done a second time.

Although BP and independent experts have suggested these results were not read correctly, Harrell said there was no disagreement about the tests aboard the rig. “If I was aware of any problem, I would have been on the rig floor,” he said.

A team of federal and academic experts assembled in the wake of misgivings about the official 5,000-barrel-a-day estimate of the leak flow has proved the doubters right. The independent panel’s preliminary estimate, released Thursday, is that the 37-day-old leak has been spewing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day into gulf waters. One part of that group pegged the upper limit at 25,000 barrels a day.

The more conservative range amounts to 18 million to nearly 29 million gallons of toxic crude oil that have bled into the gulf since the rig explosion damaged the wellhead. The grounded tanker in the Exxon Valdez accident spilled about 11 million gallons into Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

Researchers from the University of South Florida said Thursday that they had detected what they believe is a six-mile-wide plume of oil below the surface, about 20 miles from the rig. The scientists said the column of dissolved hydrocarbons is at its thickest at a depth of two miles undersea, in a canyon lying deeper than the well.

After intense criticism from Louisiana officials for not moving more quickly, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Thursday approved a permit for the state to build 45 miles of sand berms on a number of barrier islands in an effort to prevent oil from reaching more of the state’s sensitive marshes and wetlands.

The agency approved only a small portion of the state’s proposed dredging project, citing a host of environmental and practical reasons, including questions as to whether the unprecedented reconfiguring of the coast could even be accomplished in a reasonable time frame.

Meanwhile, two of seven boat crew members who had fallen ill after working on cleanup operations in Breton Sound remained hospitalized. Health, safety and environmental agencies are investigating. The men, 19 to 50 years old, suffered severe headaches, dizziness, nausea and skin irritation.

An emergency room doctor was unable to say what caused the sickness, but a hospital spokesman said the men had come in contact with a chemical-based irritant.

ashley.powers@latimes.com

jtankersley@latimes.com

bettina.boxall@latimes.com

Times staff writers Julie Cart and Jill Leovy in Los Angeles, Louis Sahagun in Louisiana, Richard Simon in Washington, and Christi Parsons and Peter Nicholas of the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

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