6700. bp, as well as admiral thad allen, hoping to see that pressure rise as this was stacked, but it s kind of ambiguous area and assessing, does it mean at that simply the reservoir of oil after three months of spilling is simply not pushing out that much pressure or does it mean there s some oil spilling somewhere else out in the well system? but the design on that cap is remarkably similar to one that was submitted by an anonymous plumber several weeks ago who may have been found in boca raton, florida. basically, if you went out and looked at the fire hydrant, that would be the blowout valve that you see in the ocean, and the planning would be the cap on top of the fire hydrant and takes the bolts off, take that cap off, and you can get a gasket, another spool piece and valve on top and that s the same concept. the bp says there s no way
robotic pieces going down. what the heck is that video? i see that all the time. reporter: that s video of the robotic cameras. remember the idea was to try and trigger that blowout valve. that s what regulates the pressure of the oil coming out. they have failed to do that for 13 days in a row. those robotic cameras you saw, the submarines did successfully cap off one of them. and i just want to quickly mention that just right now they are going to go out because the winds are calm and they will start these burns. they will use fire booms to corral between 500 and 1,000 barrels of oil. they will light on fire. the idea is you burn off the light crude and the heavy crude sinks to the bottom. these things are pretty effective. they can go through 1,800 barrels an hour. so they are effective. they have four of them on the
they have tried and tried and it hasn t worked. obviously, we have got a serious safety problem. certainly, they tried to close that blowout valve. things have changed so much, senator, over the last few days, from what we initially heard following the sinking of that drilling rig. we had initially heard from the coast guard. doesn t look like there is any oil leaking from the wellhead. things seem to be pretty good. was that premature? it may be but i don t know how to assess blame. i know that the folks are panicked down here. this thing is going to start moving east toward florida. we have our pristine beaches. we have all of this tourism. we have the delicate bays and estuaries.
coast of louisiana, the situation involving the oil rig disaster seems to be getting worse. officials from b.p. said the well is currently leaking up to 42,000 gallons of oil into the ocean each day. so far submarines have been unable to engage the blowout valve to immediately shut off the flow. which isn t good. they are hopeful the leak can be sealed within the next day or two, but if they fail it could be really months before the oil is shut off. the coast guard says the slick caused by the leak is covering more than 1, 800 square miles roughly the size of the state of delaware. the spill is expected to stay offshore at least the next three days. if it reaches land the oil could cause a serious environmental disaster. coming up, the georgia state legislature seems to have been inspired by what s going on in arizona. now they want to see the president s birth certificate. the lead sponsor of that bill is
flip those switches and what would happen, if they could trigger that blowout valve, it would not stop the three different leaks down there but it would at least shut the pressure down a little bit so they could at least ease the flow a little bit, uma. uma: it s a very delicate operation there. we keep hearing the word dispersing. what is this and how effective is it? reporter: you re going to hear the word dispersent is lot in the coming weeks because it is a fight be methods and what it does, it disperses the i. think of it as you will like joy dishwashing liquid. you when you have a sink that has oil in it, you put joy on it and it breaks up the oil, that s what it does, it uses the chemical to break up the oil in smaller pieces so it can be degraded by natural bacteria. the other key in that is they re sticking this dispersant in a pipe, as it