Calm U.S. Gulf weather aids spill fight, for now

VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) - Oil spill workers raced against time in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, hoping to take advantage of another day of calm seas in their fight to contain a huge spreading oil slick before it hits the U.S. shoreline.

Cleanup crews had a reprieve for a few days as the slow-moving slick spewing from a damaged deep-water well drifted sluggishly in calmer waters, and a flotilla of boats worked to lay miles of protective containment booms.

"The winds are helpful to us, but on Thursday they begin to be less helpful," Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said in New Orleans.

BP, under heavy pressure in Washington since a deadly April 20 rig explosion triggered the breach, has scrambled to plug the gushing undersea leak that has threatened coastal fishing and tourism and reshaped the U.S. political debate on offshore drilling.

The company used remote-operated undersea vehicles to cap one of three leaks in the ruptured well, but oil still flowed at an unchanged rate of 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) per day, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

The company expects a giant steel containment device designed to be placed over the biggest of three leaks on the seabed to be shipped toward the site on Wednesday and to be operating in the next six days.

The dome has never been tested at the depths of the leak and BP has said it has no guarantee of success.

"What could happen here, it will be a bit frustrating at the beginning, but I'm confident we will find a way to make this work," Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, told

CNN.

BP has also started drilling a relief well, but that could take two or three months to complete.

BP shares recovered on Wednesday, gaining 1.8 percent, after almost two weeks of declines that wiped more than $32 billion from the company's market value. The STOXX Europe 600 Oil and Gas index rose 0.3 percent on Wednesday.

Analysts said the sell-off after the spill was viewed as an overreaction.

U.S. oil prices were down about 1.7 percent at $81.03 a barrel on Wednesday.

The White House and U.S. lawmakers vowed to change a law limiting BP's liability for lost revenues from fishing, tourism and other businesses to $75 million. Suttles said BP, which has promised to pay cleanup costs, would pay "legitimate" claims.

"I don't think the $75 million cap is going to be the issue," Suttles told CNN. "Any impacts that are legitimate and created by this, we'll meet those responsibilities."

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is scheduled to visit wildlife refuges in Alabama and Louisiana on Wednesday as part of efforts to keep the pressure on BP after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which killed 11 workers and started the flow of oil into the sea.

On Tuesday, nearly 200 boats took part in one of the biggest oil-containment operations ever attempted, laying down and repairing miles of boom lines along Gulf shores. The slick is estimated to be at least 130 miles by 70 miles in size.

At the Joint Information Center in Roberts, Louisiana, Coast Guard Petty Officer Matthew Schofield said there had been no reports of thick oil on shore.

Environmental regulators reported a "first sighting" of a slick near the Chandeleur Islands, three narrow islands off the southeast coast of Louisiana, on Tuesday. Local officials worried that yet another potential swing in wind direction could threaten the Chandeleurs.

POLITICAL IMPACT

The spill forced President Barack Obama to suspend plans to expand offshore oil drilling, unveiled last month partly to woo Republican support for climate legislation.

The leak, still weeks or months away from being stopped, threatens to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe in Alaska, the worst U.S. oil spill.

Mississippi, Alabama and Florida are also threatened by the leak.

If the slick contacts the so-called Loop sea current, the oily sheen could eventually be carried to Miami in southern Florida, or as far as North Carolina's barrier islands, warned Robert Weisberg, a physical oceanographer at the University of South Florida.

"Exactly when the oil will enter the Loop Current at the surface is unknown, but it appears to be imminent," Weisberg said, referring to the prevailing current in the Gulf.

Asked about the possibility, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the agency did not forecast it in its 72-hour projection forecast window.

The White House is planning to set up an office in the region and was starting daily conference calls, said Bill Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, which covers the southern tip of Louisiana. It fears a direct hit.

"This is something that is going to cause mental anguish. It is causing it to me because I truly don't know what to do," he told fishermen in Pointe-a-la-Hache, a tiny village on the bank of the Mississippi River. "But we are going to see it through. We are going to make it."

A growing political debate over the environmental impact of offshore drilling was fueled by the spill. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, shot back at critics calling for the shutdown of drilling.

"They are absolutely wrong," she told CNN. Ending drilling is "not going to do anything to clean our environment, it's not going to do anything to create jobs -- it will lose jobs -- and it is not going to do anything to make America safe and energy-independent."

(Additional reporting by Matt Daily in New York and Tom Bergin in London; Anna Driver and Chris Baltimore in Houston; Pascal Fletcher in Miami; Michael Peltier in Pensacola; and Richard Cowan in Washington; Writing by Jeffrey Jones, John Whitesides and Ros Krasny; Editing by Doina Chiacu)