But Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at University of California at Berkeley who has studied offshore drilling for 55 years, said late Friday that what he saw didn't look promising.
He likened the effort to pushing food into a reluctant baby's mouth -- it only works if the force of the stuff going down is more than the force of what's coming up.
"It's obvious that the baby's spitting the baby food back" because the pressure pushing up from the well is stronger, Bea said.
SHOOT: I see a lot of crap still shooting out at obviously high pressure. So I hope their plan B has already started. Hurricane season starts in 2 days, and that can make things an awful lot more difficult than it already is.
Scientists say the images may offer clues to whether BP is getting the upper hand in its struggle to contain the oil, said Tony Wood, director of the National Spill Control School at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. If the stuff coming out of the pipe is jet black, it is mostly oil and BP is losing. If it is whitish, it is mostly gas and BP is also losing.
If it is muddy brown, as it was much of Friday, that may be a sign that BP is starting to win, he said. That "may in fact mean that there's mud coming up and mud coming down as well," which is better than oil coming out, Wood said.
Philip W. Johnson, an engineering professor at the University of Alabama, said the camera appeared to show mostly drilling mud leaking from the well Friday morning, and two of the leaks appeared a little smaller than in the past, suggesting the top kill "may have had a slight but not dramatic effect."
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clipped from finance.yahoo.com
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