flowing, will we pack up and go? the answer is clearly no, we re not gonna do that. off shore, we continue to make progress. we re running the casing in the relief well just now. we ll be cementing that casing later on tonight and into tomorrow. we ve got the equipment all hooked up to perform the static kill. and once we get the case run and cemented, we ll cally perform that operation and once we get the go ahead from admiral allen. current forecast is we ll do that activity on tuesday. after that, we still have to finish the relief well. we ll still have to go and intercept this well bore. that s on track for about the middle of august. clearly, we had some setback from tropical storm bonnie. but, i think all along we ve sometime in the first half of august, it looks like we ll achieve that so overall, it is encouraging to see out there. there s still a lot to do and there s a lot of activities. still have tens of thousands of people working on the spill.
used a record amount of nearly 2 million gallons of that chemical dispersant to break up that oil in the middle of the gulf. but now democratic congressman ed marky is actually questioning that amount. marky looked and heard that through over some documents from the government and learned that bp continued to request the use of chemical dispersants and the coast guard approved the use of the toxic chemicals despite the epa s demand to stop using them, accepting, quote, in those rare cases. the documents show the coast guard approved 74 waivers over a 48-day period after that restriction was imposed. for example, on june 13, bp received the green light to dump 36,000 more gallons of dispersant in the gulf. seeking answers in a letter to incident commander admiral allen, marky and i m quoting here, says that bp often carpet bombed the ocean with these chemicals and the coast guard allowed them to do it. end quote. back to you. what s going on with the well, with that issue aside of
gallons into the gulf. here s why some say that s bad. listen. we know that the oil, the dispersant are both toxic. put them together, they re more toxic on things that are really critical to the marine biology in the gulf of mexico. now, incident commander thad allen says that it s approved on a case-by-case basis so his field commanders actually have the authority to decide whether or not to ramp up the use of chemical dispersants or allow that oil to make shoreline impact. apparently, they decided to use more oftentimes than not those chemical dispersants. what s going on now at the spill site? they are ramping up the equipment. we have new video that we just got. we flew with the coast guard overnight and early this morning and you can see the drilling ship that will pump that heavy drilling mud into the well bore to stop this oil from leaking, they are getting ready to do
and we ve been watching those leaks over the last couple of weeks, as they ve talked about the there being no more oil flowing into the gulf. and you ve seen the media attention kind of fall off and bp talking about scaling back their efforts here. it s clear they want to get this behind them, and the less they show, i think the more people kind of lose interest. and i ve been really focused and others have been focused on making sure that that gets exposed. and as a matter of fact, as you said, when admiral allen had them bring the feeds back up, they spent the afternoon with rovs cleaning oil off of that wellhead with a chemical wand, with one of their rovs. so what does the current leak level indicate for what the plan is going forward in actually plugging this well? well, you know, lawrence, once of the things they re going forward with is this static kill, which i m very concerned about. because i m concerned about the condition of the wellhead
and i would like to say, though, even at that point at which that oil stops flowing, the commitment remains by bp to stay here along the communities of the gulf coast to make good, to restore the gulf coast. unfortunately, there s no way of knowing what s flowing into the ocean, because the live feed of the wellhead that bp had been providing was black for the past three days. this morning on his teleconference, retired coast guard admiral thad allen was asked by the daily kos why the feed was gone? allen had no answer. soon after, however, feed came back online. joining us once again tonight is former oil executive bob cavnar, who now writes about the industry at dailyhurricane.com. he is also the author of disaster on the horizon due out in october. bob, why do you think the video feed was turned off for three