Free Republic

On to Plan Z. Efforts to stop the massive oil leak beneath the Gulf of Mexico were stymied once again yesterday after the much-hoped-for "Top Kill" fix failed -- sending officials scrambling back to the drawing board. "This scares everybody, the fact that we can't make this well stop flowing," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said on the 40th day of the leak that has already spilled as much as 40 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. The combined "Top Kill" and "Junk Shot" effort -- which involved pumping heavy drilling mud and debris like golf balls and...

May 10, Associated Press reports: A junk shot would be followed by cement to seal the leak and the technique is something company officials said they might try next week. The junk shot was not tried the next week, but 16 days later under the name of Top Kill. Right after President Obama allegedly screamed: “Plug the damn hole”. The Coast Guard approved the Junk Shot called Top Kill operation. The question folks will be asking while soaking in oil trying to rescue the US Gulf Coast is: What took you so long? Let’s take a look at the time...

Suttles said that another possible solution would be to "take ground-up material of various types and try to inject it into the blowout preventer at the bottom of it and it will flow up and plug it up," an operation he compared to stopping up a toilet. The maneuver is called a "junk shot," Suttles said. The blowout preventer is a 48-foot-tall, 450-ton apparatus that sits atop the well 5,000 feet underwater. It would stop the leak, BP has said, but it has not been working properly since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in flames on April 20 and...