Tropical Storm Alex over the Gulf of Mexico on June 29.Photo courtesy NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr NEW ORLEANS, La. — Hurricane Alex disrupted the BP oil spill cleanup effort in the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday as the storm approached the Texas and Mexican coasts.
President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency in Texas as Alex strengthened into the first Atlantic hurricane of the season late Tuesday.
Alex was far from the epicenter of the cleanup operation, but churned up waves and strong winds that forced the suspension of oil skimming and booming operations off the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida.
Two vessels continued to capture oil gushing from an undersea well 50 miles off Louisiana, where the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded 10 weeks ago sparking the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
But rough seas postponed the deployment of a third vessel, the Helix Producer, that was set to nearly double the capacity of BP’s containment system.
The current containment system is capturing nearly 25,000 of the estimated 30,000 to 60,000 barrels of crude spewing out of the ruptured well every day.
Alex, the first major storm of the season, was set to make landfall late Wednesday or early Thursday south of the U.S. border with Mexico, possibly as a Category Two hurricane, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center said. The NHC said at 11:00 a.m. EDT that Alex’s hurricane winds extended outward up to 60 miles from the eye of the storm and tropical storm force winds extended outward up to 200 miles.
Alex earlier dumped heavy rains across the Yucatan peninsula, killing at least 10 people in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
Vice President Joe Biden, who toured the disaster area on Tuesday, got an earful of complaints from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) about the slow federal response.
Some 413 miles of once-pristine shorelines have been oiled, as well as countless birds and other wildlife, since the rig sank on April 22. Efforts to temporarily plug the leak have failed and a permanent solution is not expected until relief wells are completed in mid-August. Crude has gushed at an alarming rate, leaving the region’s vital fishing and tourism industries in tatters.
Jindal asked Biden for help cutting through red tape and deploying more resources to keep the oil from coating fragile coastal wetlands and fishing grounds.
“The federal government needs to increase their sense of urgency,” Jindal said in a statement after meeting with Biden. “They need to treat this spill like a war and get in it to win it. We’re here to defend our way of life.”
Obama on Wednesday lampooned Republicans over their response to the spill, seeking to turn a disaster that has been a political liability for him into a political weapon.
Obama lambasted Rep. Joe Barton (Texas), a leading Republican who called the $20 billion compensation fund set up by BP a “shakedown” and apologized to BP chief Tony Hayward during a congressional hearing.
“The top Republican on the Energy Committee even had the nerve to apologize to BP for the fact that we made them set up this fund,” Obama said in remarks released by the White House prior to a presidential event in Wisconsin. “Apologize to BP! He actually called the fund a tragedy. A tragedy? A tragedy is what the people of the Gulf are going through right now. That’s the tragedy. And our government has a responsibility to hold the corporations accountable that caused it. They want to take us backwards. We want to move forward.”
Meanwhile, the State Department announced that the United States will accept offers from 12 foreign countries to help clean up and contain the spill. Offers of boom have been accepted from Canada, Japan, Mexico, and Norway; skimmers have been accepted from France, Japan, Mexico, and Norway; and a sweeping arm system has been accepted from the Netherlands, a spokeswoman told AFP.
