alone. that s not what set a record. pretty amazing. welcome to hln on this saturday morning. i m susan hendricks. time to get you updated now. capping the ruptured oil well in the gulf of mexico hasn t worked. so now engineers are trying to plug it. here s what they re doing. bp is using deep sea robots to feed a 6-inch tube into the 21-inch tube spewing oil at the bottom of the floor. even as bp takes the latest effort, an expert is questioning the assertion about how much oil is spewing from the well. well, i ve seen the description of bp s number. and their methodology isn t clear. so i can t really say one way or the other that their number is wrong. what i can say one thing i can say for sure is that i m looking at a snapshot in time. this 30-second snapshot of this video that they posted. and during that 30-second time period, i see a flow rate of 70,000 barrels a day plus or minus 14. so it could be as low as 56 or as high as 84. federal regulators have also a
are due no n. court in utah momentarily where they re expected to be formally charged. at a news conference just minutes ago county officials say both are being held without bond. this comes just days after the 4-year-old boy s body was discovered in a canyon, disfigured, wrapped in plastic and buried. now police documents and divorce papers are details ethan s last days when things went very wrong very quickly. take a look at this. on april 28th, ethan s mother and father were officially divorced. during a custody petition his father wrote a mother has abandoned the child and i m afraid the mother will come and take him and i ll never see him again. though a judge says, she never read that letter. on may 1st, ethan arrived in utah to spend the summer with his mother. beginning on the 4th, police say the boy s mother started noticing signs of abuse and documenting ethan s injuries with her cell phone camera. she reportedly told
investigators she thought ethan needed medical attention but did not seek out a doctor for fear of her soon to be husband. by may 6th, ethan s mother remarried to nathaniel. ethan was locked in his room, badly bheeaten while they drove ten hours away to the ceremony. may 10th, missing. the very next day, his body was found. that s the back story. of course, the victim in this case was ethan stacy, the little boy, life cut short at 4 years oel. he was beaten to death. county prosecutor says there s probable cause to charge both ethan s stmother and stepfather with aggravated murder. child abuse, destruction of justice and desecration of a corpes. we re going to turn now to
reports over the last few days on how big it is. but since no one can get down there in person, we know there s a level of uncertainty. that big dome, the top hat, then there s the jump shot, we keep hearing all of these contraptions, all of these concepts a that bp is using to supposedly stop that leak, none of them have worked so far. so here s the million dollar question. what is really going to stop this thing? we turn now to cnn s david mattingly from new orleans. what is bp doing right now, david, to stop this. we ve heard about all of these terms. we just want to know the truth. what s being done to stop it? here s a new term for you, insertion tube. that s what bp is going with right now trying to insert a tube inside that leak. that s what they decided to go with first. they re going to try to see if that tube will work, if they can seal that pipe off that way and then siphon all of this leaking oil up to the surface to a containment vessel. if that doesn t work,
let s talk about what is still happening in the gulf. engineers are still trying to slow down that oil leak in the gulf of mexico. so now that we re on the, i don t know, plan c or d now, they are inserting a tube into the broken well head to seal it off. if that works they ll be able to siphon off some of the oil pouring into the gulf. how big is the leak? the oil company bp estimates 200,000 gallons of crude are spewing out of the well every day. a purdue university professor thinks that number is low. after analyzing bp s video of the leak, he puts it at more like 2 million gallons a day. bp, though, is standing by its estimate. maybe they are thinking about measure in terms of, you know, how many gallons you put into your car. you measure that to three digits of precision on the gas pump. we re not anywhere near that. the 70,000 barrels a day is strictly an estimate with this plus or minus 20% uncertainty on it. you know, so the fact that you can t measure it to a high