massive leak. let s get the details live from venice, louisiana. with a good saturday morning to you, what can you tell us about this new plan? reporter: good morning, alex. essentially, what they re trying to do is increase containment to the point that no more oil is leaking into the gulf. so this is about containment. it s not about shutting down that well. and the way that they re going to try to go about doing that is by replacing the current containment cap which has been successful to a degree in capture something oil with a better, more efficient cap with a tighter seal that can capture more oil. in addition to that, they re in the process of trying to hook up another surface vessel that can also capture oil. and between that and the existing other containment systems, they hope that there will be able to contain all of that oil so no more is leaking into the gulf. again, that s just about containment. it s not about shutting down that well. the plan for that still lies in th
those of your fast five headlines. cautious optimism along the gulf coast. crews might be able to finally contain the gushing oil well in the gulf of mexico by monday. let s get the details now from . what bp is working on is containment to the point where there is no more oil leaking in the gulf of mexico. they have a containment cap in place, it s been successful in capping that oil. they have a service vessel in place collecting oil. what they want to do is replace that cap with a more efficient cap, one with a tighter seal that will be able to capture more oil. in addition to that, they are trying to connect another surface vessel that will help them collect even more oil. and if they are able to collect all that they say they could be able to collect, they could
pipelines that are already in the area, again, to try to divert that flow of oil. they are also continuing with their plans of containment. right now they re trying to connect a surface vessel to that well so they can keep as much oil as possible from getting into the water. that s something they re working on connecting right now. mara, thank you. it was so hot in washington nancy pelosi skipped the botox and had her face injected with frozen yogurt. that s how bad. from heat to high humidity in the northeast and continued stress for the nation s power grid. nbc news correspondent ron allen is live on wall street in new york city and you ve been out for a few days now, feeling any better out there today, ron? it feels great by comparison, chris. it s about 79, 80 degrees out here and it just rand, if you can believe that, a half hour or so ago and really bringing the temperatures down. there is a cloud cover overhead and it s going to be a relatively nice day here. the highs a
they want them to appear at a meeting on thursday and they ve already said they re not coming. bp rigged another containment system in the gulf. this isn t just capturing oil, it is burning it off. mara, why would they burn it and create all that pollution in the air instead of just recapturing, and i don t know, refine it and use it? that s a great question, contessa. this second containment system is designed to direct oil to a surface vessel. they re hoping to get to about 10,000 barrels of oil a day and they say they ll be burning all of it. and the reason for that is because the vessel that they re using to collect this oil is not a storage vessel. it has no storage capacity. it was not brought in for this purpose. it was brought in for another purpose and now they found that they can use it for this as well. bp says that this is a temporary solution until they can safely get some storage vessels in the area and start transferring the oil to them so they can sell it, they can
capping out of all that oil gushing into the gulf of mexico. workers have managed to insert a four-inch tube down to the spill site, capturing some of the leaking oil and pumping it to a ship on the surface of the gulf. after weeks of bad news, they re calling it a positive step forward. we ran the they call it the riser insertion tube tool. and they ran it last night and started to get oil up to the surface into the drill ship. then we had a small problem and the tool came out of the riser, but they got that reinserted this morning and as we speak, there is oil going into the drill ship. so we need to get a bit more time with it to see how effective it can be, but it is working. cnn s david mattingly covering this story from the very beginning. david, is this the real deal or is it spin? what s going on here? reporter: it is the real deal in the sense that they re finally able to siphon some of that leaking oil up to the surface vessel and keep it out of the gulf of mexico. bu