Page 18 - Integrity Test News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

About was the second piece of drill pipe that they discovered stuck inside the blowout prev t preventer, so they had to get this new spool, landing spool over those two. and that went really well on saturday. they bolted those down yesterday and they landed the b.o.p. stack just a little while ago. so it's gone well. >> if this stack is not used to funnel gas to the surface, but just caps the flow, does that mean we ultimately never get the hard number, the kind that bp cannot fight in court in terms of how much spill there actually was, obviously, the number that would determine fines and pen...

There. but they did confirm that the cap is, in fact, on top of that well. i want to bring in jonathan serrie. is he live on scene down there. jonathan, this means they can begin tomorrow with these pressure tests to see, in fact, how stable this connection is going to be, right? >> indeed. they want to test the integrity both of the cap and also of the well itself. so they are going to be shutting several valves. they will see if any other leaks appear within the well. they also will see how the cap responds at that depth. they have never used this type of technology at a depth of 5,000 feet....

About this shut-in integrity test they're going to plan in the morning because of the down hole damage that we've talked about for the last several weeks. >> and that's where the danger lies. if they cap the well and the pressure's too great, it could actually cause a rupture somewhere else. at this hour, bp is doing well integrity tests to determine whether the well itself can withstand the pressure if they don't suck up all that oil on to the ships on the surface and instead contain it. democratic senator bill nelson joins me from capitol hill now. he's the senator from florida. if it's in b...

Where we can contain all the oil and produce it, those are two pretty good outcomes either way. i've asked bp for plans on how to do an integrity test and hopefully decide to move on that later today. >> commander, you actually urged bp to do what they are doing right now quicker than they were planning to do because you had a weather window that was opportune for this moment? >> looking at the weather patterns, we saw that there was a real long distance between troughs that were forming out in the atlantic and down in the caribbean. i consulted personally with the administrator of noaa and we...

Will you know later today whether or not that's actually been a success? >> the cap is staged right now. we have to do a seismic baseline run before we actually start it because we want to understand what the sea floor is like in case there is any change to that after we start cranking down the pressure. once the cap's on we will slowly close the valves and see if it can tolerate the entire pressure of the well bore. that will tell us a lot. we need to know the pressure inside that cap to know whether we can shut it in or will have to produce oil to keep the pressure off. we should know someth...