The White House has approved plans to construct several large offshore sand berms that BP will fund to help buffer the Louisiana coast from the giant oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana's governor said.
US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen told BP to pay for the five berms approved by the White House, in addition to one he and the Army Corps of Engineers approved last week. The British energy company later said it supported the six projects and would pay the estimated $360 million cost to build them.
The decision marked a victory for Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a rising Republican star who has lobbied for weeks to win support for the plan even as he steadfastly criticised BP and the Obama administration for what he has called a sluggish response to the oil spill.
"Our federal government does not need to be making excuses for BP," Mr Jindal said at a news conference just moments before he received word of the White House decision. "Every day they wait, every day they make us wait, we're losing our battle to protect our coast."
The sand-berm construction plan essentially calls for the manufacture of six artificial barrier islands with sand dredged from the floor of the Gulf to help safeguard Louisiana's fragile bayous and marshlands from encroaching oil.
Critics have questioned whether the berms can be built up quickly enough to keep more oil from washing ashore. But supporters of the plan say the spill is likely to remain a threat for months and that the berms could prove crucial in holding back oil debris that would otherwise be swept inland by hurricanes.
Robot submarines in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico made halting progress in BP's latest bid to siphon off oil belching from its ruptured wellhead, but tar balls and other debris from the spill posed new threats to the region's shoreline.
While BP inched ahead with its new plan to contain the undersea gusher, CEO Tony Hayward retreated from yet another public relations gaffe - apologising for his widely reported remark that "I want my life back."
The BP oil spill, which began in April, is causing an ecological and economic catastrophe along the US Gulf Coast. The company's latest attempted fix hit a snag yesterday when a diamond-tipped saw got lodged in the deep-sea pipe through which oil is billowing into the Gulf. But BP freed the cutting tool after several hours of tricky manoeuvring of its robot submarines, paving the way for the process to continue, a source familiar with the work told Reuters.
After a fruitless three-day attempt to plug up the crippled wellhead with drilling mud, BP embarked late on Tuesday on a new strategy to curtail the flow of oil that has been escaping into the Gulf at the rate of up to 19,000 barrels a day.
The latest plan calls for cutting away the leaking riser pipe protruding from the failed blowout preventer, then lowering a containment cap onto the remaining wellhead assembly to trap much of the escaping oil and funnel it to the surface.
The operation was expected to take 72 hours to complete. Officials have warned that the flow of oil could temporarily increase by as much as 20 percent between the time the riser pipe is severed and the containment cap is lowered into place. BP does not expect to be able to fully choke off the flow until August, when two emergency relief wells are due for completion.
In Pittsburgh, President Obama called for an end to oil company tax breaks in the wake of the spill and pledged to find Senate support for a bill to overhaul US energy policy.
Many thousands of fishermen, shrimpers and other seafood workers have been idled for weeks by government-imposed fishing restrictions that were expanded on Wednesday to cover 37 per cent of US federal waters in the Gulf.
The fragmented, far-flung oil slick posed a growing threat to several parts of Gulf Coast. Toxic sludge from the spill crept to within 10 miles of Florida's northwest panhandle, where officials said it could make landfall by tomorrow.
Reuters