BP Oil Well Finally Declared 'Dead'

On Sunday, September 19th, BP announced that the leaking Macondo well was finally 'dead' - ending the five month nightmare that began with a horrific rig blast that killed eleven workers and spewed millions of gallons of toxic oil, into the Gulf of Mexico.

While everybody has been waiting for this final event, it was the first 85 days that were the most harrowing, when attempt after attempt to plug the leak, failed.

It was not until July 15th that BP finally met up with some success. Using a procedure known as 'static kill', engineers pumped hundreds of gallons of mud at slow speeds through a pipe right into the blowout preventer at the top of the well and finally, plugged the leak.

Now, they could focus on the permanent solution, which involved a multistep slower procedure, to ensure there were no setbacks. The first thing they did was re-enforce the temporary seal, in early August, by inserting an additional shot of cement and mud above the existing plug.

Once sealed, they replaced the old blowout preventer - the one that had failed and caused the explosion, with a new one.

After that, they began the more permanent work - that of drilling 18,000 feet below the ocean's surface to get to the annulus or outer rig of the oil well and try plug it with cement, so that it would never spew out even a drop of oil ever again.

While this may seem like an easy task, according to John Wright, the man who spearheaded the whole operation, it was one of the toughest jobs he has undertaken in his 25-year career of capping wells. The biggest problem was the depth of the well. He had never had to drill this far down and with no video and a very weak signal especially for the last 1,000 ft. it all boiled down to skill and a bit of luck to get him to the exact spot.

Thankfully, they succeeded and were able to put to rest what seemed like a never-ending nightmare - One that has cost billions of dollars and disrupted many lives. While there is still a lot of clean-up to be done and the residents of the area are a long way from returning to their normal lives, there is hope that things will return back to normal. With a lot of human effort and some help from nature, we hope that it will sooner than later.

sources: mobile.latimes.com, news.yahoo.com