Crews working in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill recovery operation said they hoped for a break from choppy seas that hampered cleanup and restoration efforts.
Rough waters sidelined skimmers Sunday across much of the gulf, idling cleanup work off Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.
Skimmers didn't trawl the waters for much of last week when Hurricane Alex churned waves as high as 7 feet as it moved across the southern gulf.
Crews off the three states where skimmers couldn't operate "used this as an opportunity to get some new boom out there that had been damaged by the (hurricane), and to resupply vessels and to just sort of take stock of what's going on," said Perry Hatcher, a spokeswoman for the oil spill command center in Mobile, Ala.
Farther from land, the U.S. Coast Guard was
Farther from land, the U.S. Coast Guard was testing the efficiency of a super-skimmer, A Whale, a modified tanker that might be able to take up 300,000 barrels of oil-water mixture every 10 hours, said Erica Fouche, a spokeswoman at the spill response headquarters in New Orleans.
On land, cleanup crews in Louisiana searched for oil deposits buried by sand kicked up by hurricane winds. Heavy waves eroded the sand, uncovering new contamination in some areas, officials said.
In Alabama's resort communities of Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, tarballs washed up on the beaches, but civic boosters still tried to lure tourists to the area. In one YouTube video, local business officials acknowledged the beaches were closed, but pushed other attractions, such as a water park, the Times said.
Federal authorities had to close another section of the gulf off Louisiana to fishing Sunday, CNN reported. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration order added about 100 square miles of federal waters off Louisiana's Vermilion Bay to the off-limits zone.
NOAA said the new closure brings to 33.2 percent the amount of the gulf closed to fishing because of the BP spill.
BP said on its Web site the two systems collected or Farther from land, the U.S. Coast Guard was testing the efficiency of a super-skimmer, A Whale, a modified tanker that might be able to take up 300,000 barrels of oil-water mixture every 10 hours, said Erica Fouche, a spokeswoman at the spill response headquarters in New Orleans.
On land, cleanup crews in Louisiana searched for oil deposits buried by sand kicked up by hurricane winds. Heavy waves eroded the sand, uncovering new contamination in some areas, officials said.
In Alabama's resort communities of Orange Beach and Gulf Shores, tarballs washed up on the beaches, but civic boosters still tried to lure tourists to the area. In one YouTube video, local business officials acknowledged the beaches were closed, but pushed other attractions, such as a water park, the Times said.
Federal authorities had to close another section of the gulf off Louisiana to fishing Sunday, CNN reported. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration order added about 100 square miles of federal waters off Louisiana's Vermilion Bay to the off-limits zone.
NOAA said the new closure brings to 33.2 percent the amount of the gulf closed to fishing because of the BP spill.
BP said on its Web site the two systems collected or flared (burned) about 25,198 barrels of oil and 57.0 million cubic feet of gas on July 3.
The cost of the response to date is approximately $3.12 billion, BP officials said.
In Washington, Kenneth Feinberg, administrator of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, said about $130 million had been paid out to help businesses,
employees and others hurt by the oil spill that has been going on since April 20, when the Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP exploded, killing 11 workers, the Times said. The $130 million does not include funds from a $20 billion escrow account being established by BP to assist victims of the spill, he said.