that they have had time last 24 hours is that they have had time to engineer the equipment, and do desktop exercises to understand how it will come together, and they started from ground zero in building the equipment. so it was not something that was decided not to be a good idea, because we knew it would be from the start, but the question was how to build it and get it to the scene. reporter: but what about when people say, they are just throwing stuff up against the wall to see what sticks? what do you have comment on that? well, there are other oil producing companies, and all along we are making sure that the best industry standards are followed, and this is technologically logical of what is going on in the current situation, and this is what most people in the industry would have done, but it is difficult, and 5,000 feet and no human access and never been done before. 553 miles of gulf shore coast is now oil disturbed.
mike, it s probably somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 this morning. the cost associated is being paid for something out of the oil spill liability trust fund. all those charges will be back-charged and recovered from british petroleum. one other question, admiral. this sounds bizarre, but, i mean, do we know how much oil is in the gulf? i mean, this has been spewing like this now for weeks. tremendous natural resource, i think many people were unaware of. how many oil is there beneath the shell of the gulf? well, you re asking a really good question and people have been talking about for a long time. that drill hole is connected to a large reservoir 18,000 feet below the ocean floor. right now, there s pressure pushing it up. there s been a lot of talk about how much is actually coming out. i m not sure we really know. there s been an estimate used of 5,000 barrels a day, but i think we feed to remember, there s no human access down there. what we know is from
this entire response and i ve been doing this for over 30 years is that there s no human access to the point of discharge and that s something that s very, very different and anomalous about this event. are you satisfied about the response of bp and the rate that they re moving in. it s been almost four weeks now and there have been failures and learning about some of the things that went wrong leading up to the explosion? do you trust them to move in a timely fashion? in my view, bp s been relentless in our oversight because we all understand the mistakes here. there have been different tactics that have been tried sequentially and we ve learned from those and bp is rolling those in to new tactics. this has never been done before. this is an anomalous, unprecedented event. there s been a an aggregation in the houston area with the british petroleum headquarters. it s also included the department of naerj, secretary salazar and secretary chu were down there the other day and one of
this point, let s head to the front line gulf disaster. and joining us now from biloxi, mississippi, the commandant of the u.s. coast guard, admiral thad allen. admiral, is it 5,000 barrels a day that s spewing out? 50,000 barrels a day? 70,000 barrels a day? we re confused right now based on all these reports. wolf, i heard the same reports, too, if i could just comment in this regard. whether it s 1,000 or 5,000 barrels a day or 50,000 barrels a day, we have planned from the start for a catastrophic spill, so we have not been constrained in our planning by the fact that it was 5,000 barrels or some other number. i will tell you this, the only information we have from the bottom there is video from the remotely operated vehicle. there s no human access to that point of discharge. and i think we need to be very, very wary about any estimates. we need to plan for a worst case scenario and that s what we ve been doing on the surface. so, right now we don t know
let s talk about estimates. we first thought 1,000 or 5,000. frankly whether it s one, five, 10 or 15, or mobilization of resources is far beyond that. we re prepared for a catastrophic event. we have not been contained in our tactics by flow estimates. i urge us all to remember we re operating in environment where there s no human access. the only parameters we have are two-dimensional video presentation and any remote sensing we can do down there. while all that goes on, ultimately we re going to have to know the extent of the spill for natural resource and things. as far as the current response we re on top of everything on the surface and doing a great deal to break it up offshore so it won t have impact here. as far as how we re conducting the response, that can run its course. we re attacking it as if it were a much larger spill. would it surprise if it was more? i m not sure. one of the challenging thing about this entire response, and