orleans area to outline what to do after the well is permanently sealed. bp plans to start the so-called static kill on the well as early as sunday and the relief well may be ready for the bottom kill in days. admiral thad allen says he is confident those will permanently seal the well. with no oil leaking from the well for two weeks now, fisherman are pushing for closed off areas to be reopened. reporter: because so many louisiana fishermen grow up on the water, this is the only life they ve ever known. the oil spill changed that. many of the state s 12,000 fresher men have gotten accustomed to being cleanup workers, drawing checks from bp instead of the sea and because federal officials say the oil is clearing up faster than expected and the seafood appears to be safe doesn t mean the fishermen believe it. do you see contaminated seafood? we don t see it but there s a lot you don t see.
right now there is no sign of any oil leaking from the capped well and hardly any visible sign of oil on the surface of the gulf or on the beaches. it s what you can t see that has a lot of folks concerned. rob marciano is with us from ft. pickens, florida. there has to be more to this disaster than what meets the eye, correct? reporter: as you can imagine, any sort of petroleum product, if it ends up in one place and goes away, even if your drive way, there has got to be some sort of residue that s left behind. the epa and the local authorities test the water and the air, and have been doing it since the beginning, and they haven t tested the sand. people are lying on it, kids are playing in it. there is more oil here than meets the eye. the sand looks pretty clean to the naked eye, but after sunset, things look different. it lights up pretty good. it does.
have to handle it. but they re going to get these men and women out of the way because why would you put another person in the way of this? right? chad, two questions. one you may have answered it. when is it going to hit land? i know where is a big question. but when? a text 360 question from adam in san diego. if the storm makes a direct hit with the current cap in place, will it keep all the oil leaking during the storm? let s take one at a time. land fall looks like somewhere between noon and 4:00 on sunday. that s the second land fall possibly. there maybe a first landfall in the keys. that would still only be a 45 to 50-mile-per-hour, what they call a blow. people in the keys don t even worry about that. because you re worried about the oil, back here, that would happen sunday, somewhere at the noon hour, plus or minus three or four hours. it could go faster or slower. will the cap hold? we certainly hope so. a mile of padding of water
men and women out of the way because why would you put another person in the way of this? right? chad, two questions. one you may have answered it. when is it going to hit land? i know where is a big question. but when? a text 360 question from adam in san diego. if the storm makes a direct hit with the current cap in place, will it keep all the oil leaking during the storm? let s take one at a time. land fall looks like somewhere between noon and 4:00 on sunday. that s the second land fall possibly. there maybe a first landfall in the keys. that would still only be a 45 to 50-mile-per-hour, what they call a blow. people in the keys don t even worry about that. because you re worried about the oil, back here, that would happen sunday, somewhere at the noon hour, plus or minus three or four hours. it could go faster or slower. will the cap hold? we certainly hope so. a mile of padding of water even if there are waves up here,
the permanent solution is still expected to be the relief well. let me see if we ve got a picture of that that we can show you. we seem to have a lot of pictures of the new well, so let me try something else. all right. let s take a look at this. this is the idea that they the permanent idea. in the middle is the actual well, that s the one we ve got. and they re digging two holes on either side of it, intersecting that reservoir at a different place, and as a result, that will take the pressure off, and that will deal with the well permanently. now, the estimate is that 3.9 million barrels of oil have leaked into the gulf of mexico so far. sings the disaster started about three months ago. hopefully, we don t see much more oil leaking into it, so that may be the total number. it s still a remarkably, remarkably large number. and efforts continue to clean up the oil in the gulf of mexico still. there is still a great deal of oil still there, some of it washing on shores, but a lot of