Thank heavens, this part of the mess is over. But reports from the Gulf seem to indicate BP's abandoned cleanup efforts:

BP Plc started pumping cement into the top of its crippled Gulf of Mexico well, moving closer to permanently plugging the source of the world’s biggest accidental offshore oil spill on record.

“We’ll create a significant milestone and make a major step forward, probably by tomorrow when the cementing is done,” National Incident Commander Thad Allen told reporters today in Washington. “We can all breathe a little easier regarding the potential that we have oil in the Gulf ever again.”

BP pumped mud into the top of its Macondo well earlier this week, pushing back the flow of oil and gas and making the cementing possible. The cement will cure in 24 to 36 hours, and then the company will resume drilling a relief well that aims to permanently plug Macondo from below.

BP temporarily sealed the well on July 15 through a valve stack placed atop Macondo, stopping a leak that spewed 4.9 million barrels of crude since an April 20 drilling-rig explosion, according to a government estimate. The relief well near Macondo will take at least five days to finish drilling its final 100 feet (30 meters).

By filling the well from top to bottom, pushing cement into the oil and gas reservoir, London-based BP will eliminate any possibility of a leak, Allen said. The well is located about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast.

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Now that BP has gone from 1000-5000 barrels to 12,000-19,000 barrels, to 35,000 to 60,000 to 62,000 a day, Rachel feels about the same way I do about this. The latest line of B.S. from our government is that the oil and those dispersants they put out there with them are mostly gone now. Yeah right.

As Maddow reports they're now claiming 25% of the oil was boomed or skimmed, 25% evaporated or dissolved, 24% was dispersed through "human operations" and there's 26% residual that's still out there and they swear to god they're going to clean that up.

They're pretending some of these waters are safe to fish in now as well. I'll believe that when Thad Allen, all of the CEO's from BP and our EPA head start eating that fish for part of their daily diet on camera.

Here's hoping that the storm doesn't carry the chemical dispersant over the mainland:

PENSACOLA, Fla. — Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen late Thursday ordered BP to begin evacuating the Deepwater Horizon oil spill site after the National Hurricane Center predicted that sustained winds of more than 55 miles per hour would reach the area perhaps as early as Saturday.

"Due to the risk that Tropical Storm Bonnie poses to the safety of the nearly 2,000 people responding to the BP oil spill at the well site, many of the vessels and rigs will be preparing to move out of harm's way beginning tonight," Allen said. "This includes the rig drilling the relief well that will ultimately kill the well, as well as other vessels needed for containment. Some of the vessels may be able to remain on site, but we will err on the side of safety."

Allen said he had directed BP to leave the well sealed during the evacuation and said that monitoring of the well, which has not leaked oil into the Gulf of Mexico for more than a week, would continue until the last possible moment. He said BP has been told to move ships guiding remotely operated vehicles providing a video feed from the capped well last and to return them to the area first.

"While these actions may delay the effort to kill the well for several days, the safety of the individuals at the well site is our highest concern," he said.

Federal and state oil cleanup workers had begun the process of battening down across the Gulf of Mexico for a weekend tropical storm, pulling out booms and calling vessels back to port from anti-contamination efforts in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

BP says they want to permanently cap the well, but the feds want it to be opened again later. It's getting awfully hard to keep track without a scorecard -- one anonymous source tells the Associated Press there's a seep near the well:

Pilloried for nearly three months as it tried repeatedly to stop the leak, BP PLC capped the nearly mile-deep well Thursday and wants to keep it that way. The government's plan, however, is to eventually pipe oil to the surface, which would ease pressure on the fragile well but would require up to three more days of oil spilling into the Gulf.

"No one associated with this whole activity ... wants to see any more oil flow into the Gulf of Mexico," Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, said Sunday. "Right now we don't have a target to return the well to flow."

An administration official familiar with the spill oversight, however, told The Associated Press that a seep and possible methane were found near the busted oil well. The official spoke on condition of anonymity Sunday because an announcement about the next steps had not been made yet.

I don't understand enough of this to interpret what's going on, but it doesn't sound good:

NEW ORLEANS -- Worried about triggering another blowout -- possibly deep down a well of uncertain condition -- BP and federal officials have put the brakes on the latest effort to choke off the undersea geyser of crude.

Instead, they ordered a new round of analysis scheduled to start Wednesday before moving forward with pressure tests intended to determine whether a new 150,000-pound cap and a well three miles below the sea floor are strong enough to withstand the powerful flow of oil and gas.

The decision was made Tuesday in Houston, where U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and a team of federal and industry scientists and geologists are overseeing BP's plans to run a "well integrity test."

"As a result of these discussions, we decided that the process may benefit from additional analysis," U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is in charge of the federal effort, said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon.
After successfully placing a new and beefier cap on the blown-out well, the oil giant had been scheduled to start slowly shutting off valves, aiming to stop the flow of oil for the first time in three months.

If the cap works, it would enable BP to stop most, and possibly all of the oil, now gushing into the sea. The company could either use the cap as a cork to "shut in" the well. Or, if capping would create too much pressure, use the more sophisticated new cap to channel as much as 60,000 barrels a day through pipes and lines to as many as four collection ships.

Neither BP nor the federal government offered an immediate explanation of the additional analysis, but in briefings early in the day, it was clear there are still significant questions about conditions of gear on and underneath the sea floor -- particularly the casing that lines the well.

Those concerns also had prompted Chu to halt BP's earlier "top kill" effort to pump heavy drilling mud down into the well. Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, told reporters in a conference call from Houston Tuesday afternoon that the integrity test would indicate whether there was damage inside the well. If the pressure doesn't build up as valves are closed on the new cap, he said, it would point to a breech that could worsen if the well is simply capped.

In the worst-case scenario, it could trigger a blowout deep beneath the sea floor that would be difficult, and perhaps impossible, to control -- at least until BP finishes drilling relief wells. That effort is still expected to take until mid-August.

On his blog BPOilslick,John L. Wathen,
aka Hurricane Creekkeeper, posts pictures of contractors covering up the oily beaches in Gulf Shores, Alabama with fresh sand. (Which may make things look pretty for the tourists, but doesn't do a damn thing about the toxic dispersant in the water.) Heather pointed out other instances last week.

Now, a semi-plausible case might be made for covering up the oil to serve the tourist trade, I suppose -- but why would you want people swimming in that water? (Anyone remember "Jaws"?) And more importantly, why are they lying to us about what they did?

US Coast Guard issued a press release claiming that no covering of oiled beach was occurring. I sat in my motel room in Orange Beach and watched as multiple pieces of heavy equipment excavated sand and hauled it up the beach and used it to cover oiled sections of beach.

While contractors drove bulldozers, front end loaders, screening tractors and various kinds of equipment on beaches known for Turtle nesting.

I watched them from about 11:00 P.M 07/02/10 until about lunch the next day excavating the beach under cover of darkness. There was a stand of ponded water with oil and so called "Tar Balls" which was covered with sand from another area.

U. S. Coast Guard issued a press release stating that this is not happening. USCG uniformed men sat in ATV buggies and watched. I saw them and photographed them.

Why is our Coast Guard playing toady to BP? Are they nothing more than oil lackeys?

Go look at the rest of the pictures. Fascinating...

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Another day, another reason that Ken Salazar needs to be canned as Secretary of the Interior. Keith Olbermann talks to reporter Mitch Weiss who co-authored this story for the Associated Press. It really is just a damned shame it's taking the destruction of god only knows how much wildlife and entire economies in the Gulf and beyond to finally have these kind of stories coming to light and drawing enough attention from the public that our "mainstream" media is finally reporting on it.

Enviro groups stunned that govt ignoring 27K wells:

Leading environmental groups and a U.S. senator on Wednesday called on the government to pay closer attention to more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico and take action to keep them from leaking even more crude into water already tainted by the massive BP spill.

The calls for action follow an Associated Press investigation that found federal regulators do not typically inspect plugging of these offshore wells or monitor for leaks afterward. Yet tens of thousands of oil and gas wells are improperly plugged on land, and abandoned wells have sometimes leaked offshore too, state and federal regulators acknowledge.

Melanie Duchin, a spokeswoman with Greenpeace, said she was "shell-shocked" by the AP report and upset that government wasn't "doing a thing to make sure they weren't leaking."

Of 50,000 wells drilled over the past six decades in the Gulf, 23,500 have been permanently abandoned. Another 3,500 are classified by federal regulators as "temporarily abandoned," but some have been left that way since the 1950s, without the full safeguards of permanent abandonment.

Petroleum engineers say that even in properly sealed wells, the cement plugs can fail over the decades and the metal casing that lines the wells can rust. Even depleted production wells can repressurize over time and spill oil if their sealings fail. Read on...

Kindra Arnesen is the wife of a Gulf fisherman and she's been kicking butt on exposing BP abuses. In this latest news, she's discovered that BP is claiming is that if fishermen choose not to take part in the oil spill cleanup, BP will consider that as potential income declined and deduct it from their claims.

Kindra has previously talked about the serious health problems manifesting in those who have taken part in the cleanup.

In other words, if you didn't want to risk your health and expose yourself to their toxic waste, you're going to suffer financially as a result. But doesn't BP have a pretty sunflower logo?

Let's all hope this works:

Choppy seas have temporarily foiled attempts to see if a giant oil skimmer can be a silver bullet for cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico.

Bob Grantham, spokesman for Taiwanese shipping firm TMT, says the company's vessel, dubbed "A Whale," will need further testing off the coast of Louisiana.

Grantham said in an e-mail Monday that conditions in the Gulf over the weekend were too choppy to get definitive answers on the vessel's capability.

Billed as the world's largest oil skimmer, "A Whale" is supposed to be able to suck up 21 million gallons of oily water per day.

Grantham says testing will resume as soon as the water is calmer.

Cloudy skies cast a pall over South Florida beaches and rough seas hampered clean-up efforts in the Gulf -- even as crews were hoping a massive new skimmer would get the government green-light to join the fight against the growing oil spill.

Rough seas also kept clean-up vessels idle off the coasts of Florida, Alabama and Mississippi over the holiday weekend, officials said. The current spate of bad weather is likely to last well into this week, according to the National Weather Service.

Among the ships that continued to work the spill off the coast of Louisiana was a converted oil tanker called "A Whale." Its makers, Taiwan's TMT, say the craft can process up to 21 millions gallons of oil-fouled water a day.

"A Whale" had undergone tests in a patch of water close to the wellhead over the weekend as the government tried to determine the vessel's effectiveness. The ship is also awaiting approval from the Environmental
Protection Agency.

As new head of Bp's propaganda PR efforts, Bob Dudley responds to a Bp parody video released last month on YouTube, and now viewed over 8,000,000. Listen if you can to the pangs of regret in Dudley's voice, the plaintive welling of emotion, and not shed a tear for Bp.

Or as PBS NewsHour put it:

As part of an hour-long live online interview with the NewsHour's Ray Suarez, BP executive Bob Dudley responds to questions from the public, including a video parodying the BP response effort.