Originally BP (NYSE:BP) thought they would be able to kill the Macondo well by the middle of August, but weather and technical difficulties caused them to miss that timeline, and now they're looking at the week of September 6 as the period they'll be able to complete the job.
Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is the government representative watching over the ordeal, said this, "In the last 40 hours we've agreed to a sequence of actions that I'm going to direct BP to take, starting with flushing out the current blow-out preventer, actually looking for material that might cause us a problem, and actually move to put a new blow-out preventer on and then do the bottom-kill.
"This will ensure that we can withstand any pressure that may be generated," he added. "If all that lines up, we should be looking somewhere at the week after Labor Day."
Technical concerns relate to the top kill procedure, which resulted in approximately 1,000 barrels of oil being trapped in the space between rock layers and the well pipe.
There's a possibility that the bottom kill operations, which entail pumping cement and mud through the relief, could push the oil up out into the Gulf, or possibly break the original blowout preventer which a lot of liability concerning the accident is tied into.
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