and big oil knows that means less dependence on them. it s time to take charge with clean american energy. we re all over the breaking news coming in within the last few minutes. bp finally gets the green light to perform critical tests on its new oil well cap after a 24-hour delay. you just heard it and saw it live, thad allen the national incident commander briefing all of us. let s discuss what is going on with congressman ed markey, democrat of massachusetts. he s the chair of the select committee on global energy independence and global warming and has been one of the leading critics of bp in this. thanks for coming in glad to be here. thank you. do you have confidence in what you just heard from thad allen? i m hopeful.
when it is closed in, it is at a higher pressure. so what is important here is to monitor the pressure both as we close it in, and once we get closed in very, very carefully. that is, i think, admiral allen has described this that the test goes from 6 hours to 48 hours depending upon how it responds. at that point, we will analyze the results and decide whether to close the well in or open it back up and contain the flow where some of it could potentially escape into the gulf of mexico. the risk through all of the process is that somehow flow escapes outside of the casing. that is something that we don t want to occur. because we never want to take any action which could make things worse. that is why it is important to get this test right. okay. is there any danger to the casing from the testing, itself? that is what i am driving at. right. that is what we are analyzing. it is one of the concerns raised yesterday that somehow through the testing process, could the
and a democrat s secret weapon may be an old one. president obama calling on bill clinton again to help keep the party in control of the house in november. you ll see the former president hitting the campaign trail a lot in the coming weeks and months, we are told. this strategy coming at a crucial time for the white house with president obama s poll numbers fading, along with voter confidence. but first this morning, a bit of a letdown. yesterday at this time we thought we may know by now whether or not the latest attempt to fix the leaking well was a success. 86 days now, an estimated 214 million gallons of oil spilled. we have arrived at a critical moment for that brand-new cap a mile beneath the sea on that gushing well. yesterday testing was expected to begin some time tuesday. the oil giant postponed it because they want to take more time to analyze what he going on down there. retired admiral thad allen, who s leading the federal response, of course, says he s confident but
reporter: right. it is interesting, too, because early on in the day, as many of the briefings as we had originally started to have started the integrity test tuesday morning and it has been delayed and delay and woke up this morning experiencing the same delay with all of the briefings, but today, the bp officials sounded much more confident an felt like they were ready to move ahead. so i imagine that they were ready to get going with all of this. ed lavendara, standby, because we will come back to you. we are going the go to chad meyers who is getting more insight as to the breaking news we are following right now. the formal test has started and we are assessing whether this will succeed or fail. and we will also go to the white house, because they are weighing in on what is going on and the officials have been briefed by thad allen and standby. also, coming up a debate. the naacp says that the tea party movement harbors racists, and the tea party activists
those ships atop of the gulf of mexico that will contain, at least try to contain much if not all of that oil. these are critical moments, ed. oh, no question, wolf. we ve been covering this story for almost three months so to be able to get to this point i think you can see in listening to what thad allen is saying there that this is the best shred of hope they ve seen in quite sometime. to put it into a better perspective you have to remember we are probably about a month away, still, from that first relief well not only getting to where it needs to get under ground but also to be able to kill off the line for good. if this were to start working in the next 24 to 48 hours, essentially this process could be sparing the gulf of mexico from almost another month s worth of millions and millions of gallons of oil spewing into the gulf of mexico. that s why the intensity and the critical nature of this you can really kind of see permeating from thad allen s words here. there are thousand