the runaway well can be permanently plugged

the runaway well can be permanently plugged The system that Mr. Suttles referred to would use pipes BINEand other equipment installed for the failed “top kill” effort weeks ago to instead siphon some oil and gas out of the well closer to the seabed. The oil would travel through pipes up to another rig, the Q4000, which is being outfitted with processing equipment, including a device called an EverGreen burner that can burn both gas and oil.

Beyond that, BP has described a plan to replace the current containment cap with a tighter-sealing one, perhaps by early next month. A new riser system would be built that would allow for the surface vessel collecting the oil to disconnect and reconnect quickly in the event of a hurricane.

As part of that project, said Andrew Gowers, another BP spokesman, a floating production storage and offloading vessel, known as an FPSO, was on the way to the gulf from Britain and would be in place by early July.

Mr. Gowers said the FPSO should be the final stage in the containment effort, and that it should collect virtually all the escaping oil until relief wells are finished and the runaway well can be permanently plugged.

As to whether BP failed to bring adequate equipment to the site and thus could not currently handle as much oil as it might be able to capture, Mr. Gowers said the Discoverer Enterprise was chosen because it was available to be brought to the site quickly.

“We put together the capacity we could in the time available, and that continues to be growing as we learn about the amount of we are dealing with,” he said.

“We are supposed to be stewards of the land,” said Matthew Stoltzfus, a 34-year-old dairy farmer and father of seven whose family, like many other Amish, shuns cars in favor of horse and buggy and lives without electricity. “It is our Christian duty.”

But farmers like Mr. Stoltzfus are facing growing scrutiny for agricultural practices that the federal government sees as environmentally destructive. Their cows generate heaps of manureBINE that easily washes into streams and flows onward into the Chesapeake Bay.