The most ambitious bid yet to stop the worst oil spill in US history has ended in failure after BP was unable to overwhelm the gusher of crude with heavy fluids and junk. President Barack Obama called the setback "as enraging as it is heartbreaking." The oil giant immediately began readying its next attempted fix, using robot submarines to cut the pipe that is gushing the oil and cap it with funnel-like device, but the only guaranteed solution remains more than two months away.
The company determined the "top kill" had failed after it spent three days pumping heavy drilling mud into the crippled well 1,520 metres underwater. It is the latest in a series of failures to stop the crude that is fouling marshland and beaches, as estimates of how much oil is leaking grow more dire. "This scares everybody, the fact that we can't make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven't succeeded so far," the BP PLC 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."
*AP