NEW ORLEANS — After more than three weeks of efforts to stop a gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers achieved some success on Sunday when they used a milelong pipe to capture some of the oil and divert it to a drill ship on the surface some 5,000 feet above the wellhead, company officials said. 
 
 After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged pipe from which most of the oil is leaking. 
 
 “It’s working as planned,” Kent Wells, a senior executive vice president of BP, said at a briefing in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now, we do have a flare burning off the gas, and we have the oil that’s coming to the ship going to our surge tank.” 
 
 Mr. Wells said he could not yet say how much oil had been captured or what percentage of the oil leaking from a 21-inch riser pipe was now flowing into the 4-inch-wide insertion tube. “We want to slowly optimize it to try to capture as much of the oil and gas as we can without taking in a large amount of seawater,” he said. 
 
 So far, the spill has not spoiled beaches or delicate wetlands, in part because of favorable winds and tides and in part because of the use of booms to corral the oil and chemical dispersants. 
 
 The capture operation on Sunday was the first successful effort to stem the flow from the damaged well, which has been spewing oil since a rig exploded on April 20 and sank. 
 
 The announcement by BP came on the heels of reports that the spill might be might much worse than estimated. Scientists said they had found giant plumes of oil in the deep waters of the gulf, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick. 
 
 BP officials pointed out that even if the tube was successful, it was only a stopgap measure. The real goal, they said, is to seal the well permanently. 
 
 Preparations continued on Sunday on a plan to pump heavy drilling mud into the well through the blowout preventer, the safety device at the wellhead that failed during the accident. 
 
 In the procedure, called a top kill, the mud would be used to overcome the pressure of the rising oil, stopping the flow. The mud would be followed by cement, which would permanently seal the well. 
 
 Mr. Wells said Sunday that BP was a week to 10 days away from trying the maneuver. 
 
 The mud would be pumped from a drill ship, the Q4000, that is in place on the surface. Mr. Wells said the ship had more than 2 million gallons of mud on board — far more than needed — to pump into the well, which had reached about 13,000 feet below the seabed when the accident occurred. 
 
 In a brief interview, Mr. Wells said that a “junk shot,” an effort to clog the blowout preventer with golf balls and other objects before the mud is used, was still a possibility. 
 
 But in an apparent indication of the tube’s success, BP was already building a backup version. 
 
 The tube is basically a five-foot-long section of pipe outfitted with rubber seals designed to keep out seawater, attached in turn to a milelong section of pipe leading from the drill ship to the seafloor. 
 
 It was one of several proposed methods of stanching the flow of at least 210,000 gallons of oil a day that has been threatening marine life and sensitive coastal areas in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. BP officials have emphasized that none of the methods have been tried before at the depth of this leak. 
 
 At the briefing, Mr. Wells was asked about reports from a research vessel that discovered the huge plumes of oil. He said that he did not know anything about them, but that the Unified Area Command, the cooperative effort involving BP and state and local agencies, was seeking more information. 
 
 The plume reports added to the many questions that have been raised about the amount of leaking oil, which many scientists have said is far higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day. That estimate was reached using satellite imagery, flyovers and visual observation, company officials have said. 
 
 The reports also raised concerns about the use of oil dispersants underwater, which the Environmental Protection Agency approved on Friday after several tests. Normally, dispersants are used on the surface, and scientists have said that the effects of using them underwater are largely unknown. 
 
 Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, criticized BP, saying it had failed to respond substantively to his requests for more information about how it had reached its estimate of how much oil is leaking. He also said the company had refused to engage independent scientists who might offer a better assessment of the amount. 
 
 “BP is burying its head in the sand on these underwater threats,” Mr. Markey said in a written statement on Sunday. “These huge plumes of oil are like hidden mushroom clouds that indicate a larger spill than originally thought and portend more dangerous long-term fallout for the Gulf of Mexico’s wildlife and economy.” 
 
 BP began trying to insert the tube on Friday, but an effort to connect the pipe leading from the drill ship to the tube failed and the device had to be brought back to the surface for adjustments. 
 
 “This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.” 
 
 Around midnight Saturday, the tube was reinserted and worked for about four hours before it was dislodged after being mishandled by the submersibles, Mr. Wells said. 
 
 “At that time, we were just starting to get oil to the surface,” Mr. Wells said. 
 
 The oil was going to the Discoverer Enterprise, a drill ship, which has equipment for separating water from oil and can hold about 5 million gallons of oil. 
 
 Though that attempt failed, it was important because it demonstrated that features designed to keep hydrates from forming were working, Mr. Wells said. Hydrates, icelike structures of methane and water molecules that form in the presence of seawater at low temperatures and high pressures, forced BP to abandon an earlier effort to corral the leak with a 98-ton containment dome. ||||| U.S. Coast Guard Response boats work to clean up crude oil where the Deepwater Horizon sank Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico. The mobile drilling platform was engulfed in flames after an explosion Tuesday. Share Print Share 
 
 A drilling rig that burned for more than a day before sinking Thursday has fouled Gulf of Mexico waters with a potentially major spill of crude oil, officials said. 
 
 The collapse of the oil rig could disgorge up to 336,000 gallons of crude a day into waters about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. 
 
 U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said the sunken rig, the Deepwater Horizon, increased the threat for environmental damage, which previously appeared minimal. 
 
 With new challenges from the collapsed rig, a growing assemblage of cleanup crews began to work in the area, hoping to stop the oil before the spill were to reach the shore. 
 
 Meteorologists predicted a change in the Gulf's current today that would push the oil toward the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines. 
 
 But Landry said the spill isn't expected to reach the coast. “We have the ability to keep it offshore,” she said. 
 
 BP, the oil company that leased the offshore rig, said it had mobilized four aircraft that can spread chemicals to break up the oil and 32 vessels that can recover more than 171,000 barrels of oil a day from the surface. 
 
 BP officials also expected to have a million feet of boom in place to help contain the spill by today. 
 
 “We have contingency plans in place to respond to any anticipated situation, and the full resources of BP are being mobilized to implement those plans,” said David Rainey, vice president of Gulf exploration for BP. 
 
 Even then, federal and BP officials said it wasn't clear whether oil was flowing from the well after the platform sank because they didn't know what was happening underwater. 
 
 Water will dilute pollution 
 
 On the surface, cleanup crews observed a sheen of a crude oil mix on the water, a mile wide and five miles long, but it appeared to be from firefighting efforts at the rig, Landry said. 
 
 She said there's another 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel onboard the platform that could also spill. 
 
 The rig was in nearly mile-deep waters in an area known as the Mississippi Canyon. It's home to whales, dolphins, sport fish and sea birds. 
 
 Still, experts said the oil will do less damage at sea than along the coast because the water will quickly dilute the pollution. What's more, they suggested, the marine animals likely scattered after the rig exploded. 
 
 “It will affect some things on the surface, but it won't have the same devastating effect as one on the beach,” said Gilbert Rowe, head of the marine biology department at Texas A&M; University in Galveston. “I'm less worried about toxicity than annoying birds and animals with this slimy stuff.” 
 
 But Aaron Viles, of the Gulf Restoration Network, an advocacy group, said the spill demonstrated the cost of offshore drilling. He said the oil could affect a bustling fishery and the spawning grounds for the over-fished Western Atlantic bluefin tuna. 
 
 “There are always smaller spills that get overlooked,” Viles said. “This one puts the cost of offshore oil and gas exploration into focus.” 
 
 matthew.tresaugue@chron.com
– Adding to the growing international backlash against BP's botched handling of the Gulf oil spill, US officials said yesterday that the oil giant is collecting for sale so much of the oil gushing out of the broken well that it doesn't have a big enough boat to hold it, the Wall Street Journal reports. BP's latest solution? Burn it at the surface in a smokeless contraption called an EverGreen Burner, reports the AP. "It's being brought in because it can handle far more oil than this well is producing," says one expert of the burn rig. The move is the latest to call into question BP's preparedness—as well as the true quantity of oil gushing from the busted wellhead, notes the AP, which some experts say could be far greater than official government estimates.