After 'Top Kill' Fails, BP Turns to Another Strategy to Cap Gulf Oil Well

BP is now turning to another strategy to cap the out-of-control gusher in the Gulf of Mexico after saying that its three day effort to plug the well with a "top kill" of heavy mud and junk had failed.

The "top kill" was the latest in efforts that failed to contain the spill which began six weeks ago after the explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. BP engineers had first attempted with no success to fix the well's blowout preventer using submarine robots and the same fate met a plan to plug the flow by lowering a containment dome over the well.

BP will now try to use the robots to cut a pipe leading out from the 5,000-foot deep well and seal it with a containment valve, a procedure that company officials said will take four to seven days.

BP is also drilling a relief well, which is considered to be a more permanent solution to the worst oil spill in U.S. history, but that work will take another two months to complete, meaning the flow of oil may not be stopped until August.

Saying that so far the oil company had "failed to wrestle the beast to the ground," BP Managing Director Bob Dudley told ABC's This Week, ""The relief well at the end of August is certainly the end point in this game."

"The failure ... of the blowout preventers is something that's also very, very troubling," Dudley said. "It will impact the industry. It is the piece of equipment that is not expected to fail, and that's going to have implications for everyone around the world."

Addressing the latest failure, BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said, "Many of the things we're trying have been done on the surface before, but have never been tried at 5,000 feet."

Dudley was asked on CBS' Face the Nation if the containment plan posed the risk of worsening the spill if it didn't work.

"Everything ... is at risk at 5,000 feet because there's no humans down there and we rely on the technology to do this," Dudley said. "The risk here though I think is less. There's more probability of success with this than the top-kill, which was highly complex, injecting of heavy fluids through a system that we built down there. It actually functioned the way we wanted it to. We were just not able to overcome the flow from the well."

President Obama issued a sharply-worded statement after BP officials announced that the top kill hadn't worked, saying ""It is as enraging as it is heartbreaking, and we will not relent until this leak is contained, until the waters and shores are cleaned up, and until the people unjustly victimized by this man-made disaster are made whole."

The spill, now worse than that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, has caused up to 40 million gallons of oil to pour into the Gulf. The oil has already been washing up on the Gulf coast threatening sensitive marshlands and with it the breeding and fishing grounds that account for much of the region's economic livelihood.

A Democratic congressman and an Obama administration official, appearing on CBS' Face the Nation, questioned BP's motives in initially giving out lower estimates of the oil spill than now appear to be the case.

"It's important to understand that BP has a financial interest in what those flow rates are," said White House enivornmental adviser Carol Browner. "They will ultimately pay a fine based on those rates. That's why we brought in an independent team. We did not include BP in the estimates that were made available this week."

Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey, chairman of the House Energy and Environment subcommittee said said documents he received from BP in the first week of the spill saying the company believed "that it was 1,000 to 14,000 barrels per day. But what they said publicly was that it was 1,000 barrels per day. I think if everyone understood right from the get-go that BP felt it could be upwards of 14,000, that that would have changed a lot of perceptions."

Assertinging that BP officials were either lying or incompetent, Markey said, "Their focus was not completely on the livability of the Gulf. It was also on the liability of BP, and as a result, they had a stake in lowballing the number right from the very beginning in terms of the amount of oil going out into the Gulf."

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that internal BP documents indicated that there were "serious problems and safety concerns" with the Deepwater Horizon oil rig far earlier than the company disclosed to Congress last week.

The Times said BP engineers had expressed concerns as long ago as last June that the metal casing the company wanted to use on the well might collapse under pressure.