Obama On spill response (President describes finger-pointing at hearing as a 'ridiculous spectacle')

President Barack Obama on Friday angrily decried the "ridiculous spectacle" of oil industry officials pointing fingers of blame for the catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico and said the accident could bring devastation to the region and its economy.

The president also pledged to end a "cozy relationship" between the oil industry and federal regulators that he said had existed for years and into his own administration.

On Tuesday, executives of the three companies involved in the disaster — BP, Transocean and Halliburton — testified before senators and were quick to lay blame elsewhere.
In their opening statements, the executives said it was too early to draw conclusions but then explained what they thought went wrong and who was responsible.

As Obama spoke in the White House Rose Garden, undersea robots in the Gulf tried to thread a small tube into the jagged pipe that is spewing oil into the water. The blown-out well has pumped out more than 4 million    gallons of crude.

BP engineers were trying to move the 6-inch tube into the leaking 21-inch pipe, known as a riser. The smaller tube was to be surrounded by a stopper to keep oil from leaking into the sea. BP said it hoped to know by Friday evening if the tube succeeded in taking the oil to a tanker at the surface.

Obama said he shared the "anger and frustration" felt by many Americans, and he acknowledged differing estimates over how much oil was leaking.

"We know there's a level of uncertainty," Obama said. He said the administration's response has "always been geared toward the possibility of a catastrophic event."

Trying to stop the flow
Since the April 20 drilling rig explosion set off the catastrophic spill, BP PLC has tried several ideas to plug the leak that is spewing at least 210,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf a day. The size of the undulating spill was about 3,650 square miles, said Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami's Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing.

In the fateful hours before the Deepwater Horizon exploded about 50 miles off the Louisiana shore, a safety test was supposedly performed to detect if explosive gas was leaking from the mile-deep well.

While some data were being transmitted to shore for safekeeping right up until the blast, officials from Transocean, the rig owner, told Congress that the last seven hours of its information are missing and that all written logs were lost in the explosion. Earlier tests that suggested explosive gas was leaking were preserved.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com