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Obama calls well cap ‘good news’ but strikes cautious note on spill
President Barack Obama on Friday called the successful blockage of BP’s gushing oil well “good news,” but cautioned that work remains to permanently end the catastrophic spill. 
“It is important that we don’t get ahead of ourselves here. One of the problems with having this camera down there is that when the oil stops gushing everybody feels like we are done, and we are not,” Obama said.
“There still is going to be an enormous clean-up job to do,” he said. “We have got an enormous amount of work to do and people down in the Gulf, particularly businesses, are still suffering as a result of this disaster.”
Obama spoke to reporters in the White House Rose Garden as BP and federal officials continue pressure tests on the well.
The spill has been a political nightmare for the Obama administration for three months, and he’s repeatedly expressed frustration with the inability of BP to seal the well. Frustration boiled over at one meeting where he told aides to “plug the damn hole.”
The oil spill dovetailed with new economic ills that have the administration and House and Senate Democrats fearing they could lose control of Congress this fall.
While the containment cap by no means ends the crisis in the Gulf, the news that BP had finally had some success in cutting off a spill that has continued for 87 days was good news for the administration and was greeted with relief by Republicans as well.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) breathed a sigh of relief in response.
“Finally, let’s keep it that way,” Boehner told reporters.
“It’s been 87 days that oil’s been spewing. I’m glad that we finally got it stopped, let’s hope it stays that way. And let’s make sure that we understand what happened so that it can never happen again,” Boehner said at a press conference in the Capitol.
BP, using a new containment cap, ended the flow of oil Thursday afternoon, but it remains unclear whether the new cap will be used to keep the oil shut in or whether valves will be re-opened and the siphoning of oil into ships will resume.
The cap is part of an improved containment system capable of capturing as much as 80,000 barrels of oil per day, which would allow surface capture of essentially all the escaping petroleum.
“The new cap is good news. Either we will be able to use it to stop the flow, or we will be able to use it to capture almost all of the oil until the relief well is done,” Obama said.
“Even if it turns out that we can’t maintain this cap and completely shut off the flow of oil, what the new cap allows us to do is essentially attach ... more containment mechanisms so that we are able to take more oil up to the surface and put it on ships so that it is not spilling into the Gulf,” he said.
Officials are conducting tests to determine whether pressure levels indicate the oil is leaking out elsewhere on the sea floor — thus far BP has reported that the well structure appears intact and that oil is not escaping.
The tests are vital to ensuring the success of a relief well to permanently end the leak that began with the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon. The relief well is slated to be completed next month.
“We won’t be done until we actually know we have killed the well, and that we have a permanent solution in place. We are moving in that direction, but I don’t want us to get too far ahead of ourselves,” Obama said.
Obama also said he is planning to return to the Gulf Coast again in the next several weeks.
—This story was posted at 10:48 a.m. and updated at 11:55 a.m.
