finger-pointing or irresponsibility. we ve got the latest live from the gulf. plus, survivor winner ethan zahn victorious in an even tougher battle, survival over cancer. how a coincidence linked to the show may have helped save his life. next on larry king live. good evening. i m jeff probst sitting in for larry tonight. let s get right to the latest from new orleans with cnn s david mattingly. david, what are they doing right now to stop the spill? jeff, right now they re trying something they have never done before. not just at this depth, at this mile down at the bottom of the ocean, but never before have they tried this, where they re going to insert a tube inside that leaking pipe. the idea is they hope they will seal that up tonight and be able to siphon that oil that is now leaking into the gulf of mexico
good evening, everyone. tonight in the gulf of mexico the latest attempt to reduce that flow of oil may already be under way at this hour. bp hopes to start siphoning oil away from the gusher tonight using a mile-long tube to transfer oil to a ship. the strategy is designed to minimize the oil leak. it s still too soon to predict when the leak might be completely sealed. let s turn to cnn s david mattingly. he joins us from new orleans. david, anything new on the efforts to insert that tube into the leak now? reporter: only that tonight is the night that bp thinks they re finally going to get this right. they said that last night. but they encountered a problem. they had to bring the device all the way back up to the surface. they made some adjustments, put it back down, and they re now attempting to do what they have not been able to do since that rig sank. now, what they re going to do is put that tube inside that leaking pipe, and it s supposed
reporter: what we ran into last night says bp was a little bit of a setback. they have the insertion tube ready to go, ready to insert into the leaking pipe at the bottom of the gulf of mexico. but the frame around it, they had to bring it up to the surface again last night to make some adjustments because they weren t able to connect the hose or the pipe that is going to siphon off all that oil up to a surface vessel to contain the oil. so, they re going to they had to take it up, made some adjustments, they re going to try again this evening, they hope to have it operational sometime tonight. so let s talk about the dispersants i mentioned as i was leading up to you, david? have dispersants been used in this way in this volume? reporter: this is a huge experiment. it has never been used in this quantity. it has never been used applied at the source underneath the surface of the water. until now this has been used on the surface to handle an oil
weekend. he says that combination could collect all the leaking oil, 60 to 80,000 barrels a day by government estimation. so, for the first time in almost three months, oil will gush but not into the gulf. or that s the hope. phil keating live at the port of new orleans tonight. phil, how is this supposed to work. got a window of good weather over the next week and ten days. hopefully with that and a lot of good fortune finally have long overdue great news. this the existing cap that s on the leaking pipe is going to be removed. that means for three or four days, oil and methane gas will be spewing into the gulf with no cap on top of that pipe. then, the pipeline is going to be recut so that the new cap, called the top hat 10 will actually fit much more snuggly unlike the current cap and that in theory, will mean no more oil and gas spilling out underneath it into the waters. but that will just contain all of the oil, actually killing this leak and plugging it for good. it s still go
to seal up. they hope to collect most of the oil that s coming out of there and trap, it send it up to a containment vessel on the surface. so far they have not been able to do that. they failed in the attempt to put a containment dome over it. that cost them more than a week. and now this one is the one that they re going for. they have something set aside just in case this doesn t work. but they are trying to make this insertion tube the solution to the problem that they ve had now for weeks. did they tell you what is, david, is set aside, or are they keeping that to themselves? reporter: what they have set aside is a smaller containment dome. we ve talked about this a lot. it s called a top hat. it s a smaller version of the larger containment dome that they tried over a week ago. the smaller containment dome is plan b just in case this insertion tube does not work. that dome would go over the leaking pipe and siphon the oil off the same way that this insertion tube is supposed