Nearly five months after the explosion that unleashed the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the ruptured well at the heart of the disaster has been permanently cemented shut, federal officials announced Sunday.
"Additional regulatory steps will be undertaken, but we can now state, definitively, that the Macondo well poses no continuing threat to the Gulf of Mexico," former Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the federal government's point man on the disaster, said in a statement issued Sunday morning.
BP, the oil company that owns the well, began final cementing operations to plug the blowout on Friday. Pressure tests conducted early Sunday confirmed the cement was holding, and the Interior Department agency that regulates offshore drilling pronounced the well dead at 5:54 a.m. (6:54 a.m. ET).
"With this development, which has been confirmed by the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, we can finally announce that the Macondo 252 well is effectively dead," Allen said in the statement.
The April 20 blowout sank the oil rig Deepwater Horizon and killed 11 workers aboard. The well, located about 40 miles off the southeastern Louisiana coast and about a mile below the surface, spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels (206 million gallons) of crude into the Gulf of Mexico before it was temporarily capped in July.
The spill struck hard at some of the pillars of the Gulf Coast's economy as oil washed up on beaches in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, federal and state authorities shut down Gulf fisheries, and a temporary federal ban on deepwater drilling idled oil workers.
At the White House, President Barack Obama hailed the "final termination" of the well but said the federal government will continue to do "everything possible to make sure the Gulf Coast recovers fully from this disaster."
"This road will not be easy, but we will continue to work closely with the people of the Gulf to rebuild their livelihoods and restore the environment that supports them," Obama said in a written statement. "My administration will see our communities, our businesses and our fragile ecosystems through this difficult time."
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| This September 18, 2010 BP video frame grab shows a remote operating vehicle (ROV) working at the site of BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: Reuters/BP/Handout |
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