HOUSTON - BP Plc began moving ships and workers back to a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a storm diminished on Saturday, but work to permanently plug the well may not resume for a week, officials said.
It will take that long to reconnect a rig drilling a relief well intended to halt the leak for good, said Robert Donaldson, a spokesman for the U.S. government’s joint incident command.
"The Development Driller 3 has started to move back out because the storm is not as fierce as we thought it would be," Donaldson said.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Feinberg, the independent administrator running a $20 billion fund set up by BP to compensate people for financial losses from the oil spill, said the British energy giant is holding up payments to economic victims.
"I have a concern that BP is stalling claims. Yes, BP is stalling. I doubt they are stalling for money. It’s not that. I just don’t think they know the answers to the questions (by claimants)," Feinberg told reporters in Alabama.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Tropical Depression Bonnie was less likely to redevelop into a tropical storm and could degenerate into an area of low pressure later on Saturday.
The approach of the storm had forced many workers and ships at the spill site to evacuate.
"We think that the system no longer has a threat of becoming a tropical storm again," said Lixion Avila, a senior forecaster at the Miami-based hurricane center.
Bonnie was downgraded from a tropical storm to a depression as it weakened on its trek across Florida into the Gulf on Friday. Avila said Bonnie could dissipate into a broad area of low pressure if its sustained winds fall another 5 miles (8 km) per hour.
The storm was on course to make landfall between the Louisiana coast and Florida’s northwest Panhandle late on Saturday.
The ruptured deep-sea well — a mile (1.6 km) under the ocean surface — is located off the coast of Louisiana.
BP sealed the leak last week with a tight-fitting containment cap, choking off the flow of oil for the first time since an April 20 rig explosion killed 11 workers and sent crude spewing into the Gulf, soiling coastlines in five U.S. states and devastating tourism and fishery industries.
It was unclear how long the interruption would push back BP’s mid-August target date for completing a relief well that would permanently plug the ruptured well. But the well will remain capped, easing fears the flow would resume.
‘NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL’
The storm preparations also delayed another potential solution, the launch of a "static kill" operation to pump heavy drilling mud and possibly cement into the well.
Thousands of businesses in Gulf coast states have been crippled by the oil spill.
BP agreed to set up the $20 billion fund under pressure from U.S. President Barack Obama.
Feinberg spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a town hall meeting in southern Alabama at which fishermen and other business owners expressed frustration and anger at what they say is a slow and complex claims process that lacks transparency.
"After today there will be no more business as usual. I learned today the depth of frustration in people here on the coast," Feinberg told the meeting.
BP’s spill, the worst in U.S. history, is believed to have spewed more than five million barrels of oil into the Gulf and has complicated relations between close allies the United States and Britain.
In another development involving BP, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a letter to a U.S. lawmaker that the British energy company behaved in a "perfectly normal and legitimate" way in lobbying the British government in 2007 for a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya.
In the letter to U.S. Senator John Kerry, Hague reiterated the British government’s position that there is no evidence BP had any connection to Scottish authorities’ release last year of the man convicted of the 1988 bombing of a U.S. airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.
British documents show several discussions between BP and the British government in 2007, Hague said, when a prisoner transfer deal with Libya was being negotiated at the same time BP was pursuing an oil exploration deal with Libya.
The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Kerry, has scheduled a July 29 hearing to examine whether BP’s oil interests influenced the 2009 release of the only person convicted in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The bombing killed 270 people, most of them Americans.
