By CURTIS MORGAN, ANITA LEE AND STEVE ROTHAUS
McClatchy Newspapers
GULFPORT, Miss. — Shifting and easing winds on Monday bought time for weather-beaten crews to bottle up and burn off a massive slick of rust-colored crude oil before it fouls fragile marshes and sugary beaches across four Gulf Coast states.
That reprieve, however, could also have a nasty ripple effect – pushing outlying plumes of polluted surface water and patches of tar balls into the Gulf of Mexico’s powerful loop current. That would propel the mess across the mangrove islands, seagrass beds and coral reefs of the Florida Keys, then up toward Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale and beyond.
Trajectories from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest the oil will remain offshore at least through Tuesday, and a University of Miami oceanographer said a weather front expected in 24 to 48 hours will likely begin pushing the spill away from the Gulf Coast and toward the loop current.
Chemical dispersants pumped into the Gulf near where the oil is spewing from the seafloor seemed to be helping to keep oil from floating to the surface, officials reported in a mid-afternoon briefing, but efforts to activate a shutoff valve underwater continued to be unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, BP officials said they’d try Tuesday to place the first of three 98-ton steel and concrete containment domes over one of the leaks in hopes of capturing the escaping oil and pumping it to an oil tanker. Officials said they hope that two other containment domes would be in place within the week.
The containment domes, however, aren’t certain to work, and preparations continued throughout the Gulf coast for environmental disaster.
“The magnitude of this spill is daunting,” said Michael Sole, Florida’s secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, “We still have an ongoing release of some 5,000 barrels of oil occurring just 50 miles off Louisiana. It’s not like, ‘We had a spill. We’re cleaning it up, and it’ll be over.’ ”
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist on Monday added 13 more counties to his declaration of a state of emergency, bringing the total number of countries now threatened to 19.
“It is an enormous mess,” Crist said. “It is unbelievable, the magnitude of this thing. Clearly every effort needs to be put on plugging the hole up and stopping the bleeding.”
Attorneys general from the five Gulf Coast states also asked President Barack Obama to take legal steps necessary to lay blame for the massive Gulf oil leak.
Chris Bence, a spokesman for Alabama Attorney General Troy King, said a letter was prepared asking the president to clear the way for possible court action. Attorneys general from Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas also joined the request.
How serious the damage would eventually be from the spill was still anyone’s guess, however.
A flight over the spill found that the slick remains 35 to 55 miles off the Mississippi coast, but that it was clearly affecting the barrier islands off shore.
Patches of oil were clearly visible within the Chandeleur islands. Small patches of what appeared to be rust-colored oil were spotted in the channel between Cat Island and Ship Island, 11 miles south of Gulfport.
An island in the Chandeleurs surrounded with a pink anti-oil boom was covered with nesting birds.
Mississippi state officials said Monday that the oil had advanced 20 miles closer to the coast since Sunday. However, they said Coast Guard officials assured them that they’d get at least 72 hours’ notice before the oil threatens the coastline.
