BP switches on live video from oil leak

One month after the fiery collapse of the Deepwater Horizon, BP bowed to demands from scientists and members of Congress this week and has posted a live video feed of the gusher of oil on the ocean floor.

The decision came only hours after a hearing in Congress in which BP was accused of withholding data from the ocean floor, and blocking efforts by independent scientists to come up with estimates for the amount of crude spewing into the Gulf each day.

Ed Markey, who presided over the hearing, said BP would post the footage on the website of his house subcommitte on energy independence and global warming as early as Wednesday night. It was delayed but is now live.

The footage could help defuse rising anger at BP from scientists and news organisations at the oil company's reluctance even to discuss the size of the spill. BP has refused to share data gathered by cameras on its submersible robots. Its officials have also insisted repeatedly that it is impossible to determine the size of the spill.

The lack of disclosure put BP under fire yesterday.

"Oil has been spewing into the ocean for 30 days yet the true extent of this spill remains a mystery," an angry Markey told the hearing yesterday. "BP thinks this is their ocean so they should control information about the spill."

The Obama administration too was criticised for sticking to its early estimates of 5,000 barrels a day — a much lower estimate than those produced by independent scientists.

The coast guard said this week it was assembling a team of experts to produce an estimate of the spill.

Earlier yesterday, four independent scientists told Markey's committee that BP's refusal to release the footage was blocking independent efforts to estimate the size of the spill.

Richard Camilli, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, said BP had intitially reached out to experts for help in measuring the spill. He was set to fly to Houston to join the effort at 3am on 5 May. A day later, BP called off the visit.

"The rationale was that they were on a very tight time schedule," he said. "The greater priority was to place the containment structure over the main leak" — an effort that failed.

Frank Muller-Karger, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida, told the hearing the full consequences of the spill — or of the chemicals used in the clean-up effort — remained unknown.

"I think this is a problem we are going to have to live with for years rather than months," he said.

Before last night's decision, BP had released just two short pieces of video from the ocean floor — frustrating scientists who had been trying to estimate the size of the spill.

But experts still managed to use the first clip, which was barely 30 seconds long and low-resolution, to produce estimates that were many times larger than the Obama administration estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University who was also at yesterday's briefing, came up with an estimate of 70,000 barrels a day.

He told the committee yesterday he could not conceive of a scenario where the flow of oil from the ruptured well was only 5,000 barrels a day. "All outsider estimates are considerably higher than BP's."