Oil spill siphoning picks up

US: Efforts to siphon off oil and gas gushing from a ruptured deep-sea wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico are working, U.S officials said on Saturday, as President Barack Obama defended his handling of the environmental crisis.

After soiling wetland wildlife refuges in Louisiana and barrier islands in Mississippi and Alabama, the black tide of pollution has reached some of the famous white beaches of Florida, nicknamed the "Sunshine State."

The toll of dead and injured birds and marine animals, including sea turtles and dolphins, is climbing.

"No matter how many people we have out, we can never scour the coast well enough to find every single animal in time to save it," said Sharon Taylor, a wildlife veterinarian with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, working at the Fort Jackson Wildlife Center in Buras, Louisiana.

But 47 days into the crisis and after several false starts, a partial solution finally appears at hand.

The small "top hat" containment cap that British energy giant BP Plc clamped over the leak siphoned oil on Friday at a rate well above initial estimates, U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said at a briefing in Theodore, Alabama.

BP estimated Friday's collection at 6,077 barrels, and on its Twitter feed said that "improvement in oil collection is expected over the next several days."

The collection rate is still only about one-third of one day's flow from the oil geyser, which has been estimated by the government at about 19,000 barrels (800,000 gallons/3 million liters) per day.

But it was the first significant progress in the nearly seven-week-old drama that has captured the world's attention and forced the Obama administration to reconsider plans to expand offshore oil drilling as a way to reduce the U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

Allen said the full capacity of BP's containment device was 15,000 bpd, which he called the "upper limit" of the current leak control effort.

Vanice, Sunday, Reuters