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Stuck Saw Delays Effort to Cap Well

Oil continued to flow as technicians attempted a repair at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico in this image taken from a BP live video feed on Tuesday.Credit...BP, via Reuters

The latest procedure to try to contain the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico hit a snag on Wednesday when a saw that was being used in a crucial part of the operation became stuck, officials said.

The diamond-laced wire saw was being used to cut the riser, the milelong pipe that once ran from the wellhead up to the drilling rig and now snakes along the seabed. A technician involved in the effort said that the wire saw had cut less than halfway through the riser when it stopped being effective. The saw was freed later Wednesday afternoon.

The technician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the work, said it appeared that the saw was dulled by material inside the riser - including, perhaps, some of the objects pumped into the well during the failed "top kill" procedure last week.

The cut was part of a strategy to place a containment cap over the well and funnel the leaking oil up through a new riser to a ship on the surface. A variation on this tactic was tried several weeks ago with a 98-ton box that was to sit over the worst of the leaks, but it failed when the box became clogged with hydrates, icelike crystals of gas and water.

Officials planned this time to fit a cap snugly over the well to reduce the influx of water. For this to happen, the original riser must be sheared off completely.

The technician said that rather than trying again with the saw, the plan now was to use a large shear to cut the riser. The shear, about 20 feet long and nearly 10 feet high, was used to make an earlier cut in the riser about 50 feet away. Because it will not make as clean a cut as the wire saw, modifications will have to be made to the containment cap. The technician said he still expected the cap could be in place by Thursday.

 

Campbell Robertson reported from Houma ; Joseph Berger and Henry Fountain from New York.

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Stuck Saw Delays Effort To Cap Well. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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