provide enough surface equipment to handle it

provide enough surface equipment to handle it In a letter to Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer sunmmerfor exploration and production, Rear Adm. James A. Watson, the on-scene coordinator of the unified command that is overseeing the response effort, gave the company three days to provide plans for “parallel, continuous and contingency collection processes.”

Among the requirements, Admiral Watson wrote, are that any new method to contain the leak be devised to reduce disruptions from hurricanes, when the full flow of oil would once again spew into the gulf.

The letter came amid continuing questions about how much of the leaking oil was being captured by BP’s latest containment effort, a cap that was lowered over the top of the well last week, and whether the company could be collecting more but had failed to provide enough surface equipment to handle it.

BP said it captured about 15,000 barrels of oil on Tuesday, which it has said is about the daily limit that its collection ship, the Discoverer Enterprise, can process. But video feeds from the seabed continued to show oil billowing out from under the cap, and company officials reiterated that there was no way of knowing how much was coming from that source or from several vents atop the cap that remain open. Some experts have said the amount could be very high and that the leak could have been made far worse by the containment effort.

But Mr. Suttles, in an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show, said that an additional system being installed to collect and process 5,000 to 10,000 barrels a day “should give us the capacity to capture the great majority, the vast majority of this flow.”

In response to the letter from Admiral Watson, which was dated Tuesday, David Nicholas, a BP spokesman, said the company worked “extremely closely with the federal authorities including the Coast Guard in all our operations and will continue to do so.” Previously, BP engineers working on containment and sunmmercapping efforts had said that all plans and projects were sent to the unified command for approval.