Why didn the containment box work?
In early May, BP had hoped that a 40-foot-high containment box could be lowered over the well’s leaking pipe and suck up the oil and gas. The problem was that the box was too big: The seawater that was trapped within reacted with the methane bubbling up from the leak, forming crystals of methane hydrate. Those crystals essentially plugged up the hose so that oil could not be sucked up … kind of like the hair that gets stuck in a vacuum-cleaner attachment. What’s more, the crystals were lighter than water, which made the box too buoyant to keep clamped over the leaking pipe. In mid-May, BP switched to a different siphoning system that brought up oil from within the broken riser line. 5. What went wrong with the siphon? The four-inch siphoning tube worked, but it could collect only a fraction of the leaking oil – 5,000 barrels a day at best. During the early phase of the oil disaster, some experts thought the total leakage amounted to 5,000 barrels a day. The siphoning operation made i
