Missteps in Oil Spills cleanup?

1. Since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, outsiders watching the cleanup say, the federal government and BP have made key mistakes that delayed or distracted the effort to stop the spill. Some were probably inevitable: BP engineers and government officials were forced to improvise in the face of mounting disaster.

2. Officials used "dispersants" to break up the oil. But some experts think that those chemicals caused much of the oil to remain below the water's surface, out of reach of standard cleanup techniques.


3.  The first attempt to place a "dome" over the well failed because of a well-known problem called hydrate crystals. 

4. The government and BP repeatedly under-estimated the oil's flow, and BP was not ready to capture all of the oil being siphoned up from the well.

5. We didn't know what state the blowout preventer was in, what state the well was in, what state the riser was in, so there's been a lot of learning," Odone said. "We've learned. I don't know if we've made mistakes. I think we've tried things and we've learned from that."

6. So far, statistics of the cleanup effort indicate, at best, mixed success. A flotilla of vessels have skimmed 21.9 million gallons of oily water from the gulf, and 5.2 million gallons have been burned.

7. BP has siphoned 202,000 barrels (8.5 million gallons) to the surface using a "cap" over the leak. That rate increased Wednesday, when a second specialized ship arrived to help with the task. Also, on Thursday Allen said a relief well, being drilled to plug the well far beneath the sea floor, was ahead of schedule.

8. But the oil is still spreading faster than it can be cleaned from beaches and marshes. On Thursday, the Coast Guard said oil was on about 72 miles across the Gulf Coast, up from 68 on Sunday

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