Tropical storms threaten to blow BP's spill plans off track

A TROPICAL depression racing toward the Gulf of Mexico yesterday increased the pressure on BP and the US government to decide whether to evacuate dozens of ships at the site of the ruptured oil well.

The National Hurricane Centre in Miami said a cluster of thunderstorms in the Bahamas formed into a tropical depression yesterday morning. It could reach the spill site in two-and-a-half days, said Lexion Avila, a senior hurricane specialist.

Seas were choppy in the Gulf yesterday, with waves up to 5ft rocking boats as crews waited for orders on whether or not to leave.

Non-essential vessels, such as barges and skimmers, are likely to be sent back to shore, Commander Terri Jordan told the crew of the coastguard cutter Decisive. She said they were awaiting an evacuation order for key vessels. Work on plugging the well is at a standstill just days before the expected completion of a relief tunnel to permanently throttle the free-flowing crude.

Worse yet, the government's spill chief said foul weather might require the reopening of the cap that has contained the oil for nearly a week, allowing oil to gush into the sea again for days while engineers wait out the storm.

"This is necessarily going to be a judgment call," said retired coastguard admiral Thad Allen, who was waiting to see how the storm developed before deciding whether to order any of the ships to leave.

BP spokesman Scott Dean said yesterday that no decisions had been made. Crews had planned to spend Wednesday and yesterday reinforcing with cement the last few feet of the relief tunnel that will be used to pump mud into the gusher and kill it once and for all. But BP put the task on hold and instead placed a temporary plug, called a storm packer, deep inside the tunnel, in case it has to be abandoned until the storm passes.

"What we didn't want to do is be in the middle of an operation and potentially put the relief well at some risk," said BP vice-president Kent Wells.

If the work crews are evacuated, it could be two weeks before they can resume the effort to kill the well. That would upset BP's timetable, which called for finishing the relief tunnel by the end of July and plugging the blown-out well by early August.

As the storm drew closer, boat captains hired by BP for skimming duty were sent home and told they would not be going back out for five or six days, said Tom Ard, president of the Orange Beach Fishing Association in Alabama.

In Florida, crews removed booms intended to protect waterways in the Panhandle from oil to prevent high winds and storm carrying the booms into sensitive wetlands.

BP's broken well spewed between 94 million and 184 million gallons into the Gulf before the cap was attached. The crisis - the biggest offshore oil spill in US history - unfolded after the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April.