NEW ORLEANS -- The best short-term solution for bottling up the oil spill threatening sealife and livelihoods along the Gulf Coast should be arriving today.
It's a specially built giant concrete-and-steel box designed to siphon the oil away.
Crews have put the finishing touches on the 100-ton containment dome. A barge at about midday is expected to haul the dome to the spot 50 miles offshore. That's where a mile-deep gusher from a blown-out undersea well has been spewing at least 210,000 gallons of crude a day into the Gulf for two weeks. A spokesman for oil giant BP says it would be deployed on the seabed by Thursday.
Such domes have never been tried at this depth -- about 5,000 feet -- because of the extreme water pressure. The dome, if all goes well, could be fired up early next week to start funneling the oil into a tanker.
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A roundup up of today's Gulf Coast oil spill stories
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