a mass murderer? investigators are trying to solve this 178-year-old mystery. i m wolf blitzer. you re in the situation room. new questions are being raised about the lingering effects of the worst oil spill in u.s. history and whether federal officials are being a little too quick to declare that the disaster is mostly over. cnn s kate bolduan has been looking into conflicting figures for us and has more on what s going on. what is going on, kate? okay. well, wolf, the well is capped. we know that. and we are told it will soon be killed officially. but big questions do still remain about how much oil is out there and what the short and long-term impact really is. turns out there s no easy answer so far. reporter: so where has all the oil gone? well, it seems that depends on who s talking. according to the government, about 3/4 of the oil is effectively gone. what is left is 26% of the 4.9 million barrels. now is that completely accurate? no, it is the it s based on
departure to try to have the discussion to understand what are the implications long-term. we still have to deal with natural resource damage estimates and so forth. so i would be the first it admit and i wasn t the scientist taking part in this. i m a user in this, that you can argue at the margins about is this the proper model or not. the question is, do we think we know what happened? do we have a starting point to have a discussion. and i think marshall mcnutt would say, if we have better information we could find this. but we ve slowly close in on the flow rate. flow rate leads us to a total amount. from a total amount we know that certain things happen. there s certain things we can t quantify right now and what we can t quantify allows us to do a model to estimate. you ve been listening to admiral thad allen. we ve pumped the mud and they re almost finished with the cement. that will finish tomorrow. it s not all done yet. people need to go back to their lives along the gulf.
is still left. and naomi campbell, certainly no stranger to the courtroom. but this is a first, at least as far as we can tell. a supermodel on the witness stand out a war crimes trial. good morning, everyone, i m brooke baldwin in for tony harris. the story, the comments right here, right now in the cnn newsroom. highlighting the struggle for out-of-work americans they re facing in critical condition. i want to you take a look at the numbers. first time claims for unemployment jumped unexpectedly last week. economists had predicted a small drop but the labor department said 679,000 americans filed jobless claims for the week that ended july 31st. by the way, that s a jump of 19,000 from the previous weeks. folks, this is the highest level since the week that ended april 10th. and speaking of jobs where is the president today, this day after his 49th birthday? still in chicago, talking jobs. he s visit a ford plant that is adding jobs. right around 11:15 eastern, we wil
about this. first of all these are the government estimates being developed by our flow rate technical team under the director of marshall mcnutt, the head of the geological survey and the best scientists in the country involved in this. i told them from the start when i set this group up, we need to challenge our assumption and refine the work and to extent that we can improve on the estimating they ve been doing that. and i told them to come back periodically and let s see if we can get it to a much better place as far as accuracy. the fact of the matter is we ll never know to a virtual certainty what that flow is until we can actually measure it through a pipe with no oil leakage, but in the meantime we need to continue to refine the estimates, and they are government estimates and they ll continue to change and hopefully get more accurate. presumably be a whole lot worse after the procedure cut took place in june, but we don t know by how much, multiple fact earnings or 20%. do y
i m wolf blitzer, you re in the situation room. we should find out soon whether the federal government has signed off on bp s new proposal to cover more leaking oil. a decision was promised late today. almost 100,000 barrels of oil have been collected. as we near the two-month mark in this disaster. but that s just a drop in the bucket. after researchers double their estimate of the flow rate yesterday. the obama administration says it s pouring resources into the gulf, spending about $140 million on the clean-up so far. a new warning today that oil could destroy the gulf marshlands and affect millions of birds that migrate there during this winter season for generations, generations to come. president obama returns to the gulf coast monday for a two-day tour of the spill areas. he hasn t inspected before. he ll be back here in washington on wednesday. at that time, he ll confront the chiefs of bp. i asked the president s point man in the gulf admiral about that and more.