Ships Ready To Evacuate Gulf Oil Spill As Tropical Storm Looms

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ON THE GULF OF MEXICO

Crew members aboard dozens of ships in the Gulf of Mexico prepared Thursday to evacuate as a tropical rainstorm brewing in the Caribbean brought the deep-sea effort to plug BP's ruptured oil well to a near standstill.

Though the rough weather was hundreds of miles from the spill site and wouldn't enter the Gulf for at least a few more days, officials ordered technicians trying to plug BP's well to stand down because they needed several days to clear the area, where about 65 ships are tending to the spill.

"It's a controlled chaos out there," Lt. Patrick Montgomery told an Associated Press reporter aboard the Coast Guard cutter Decisive heading to the spill site from Pascagoula, Miss.

The cutter, with a 75-member crew, is the Coast Guard's primary search and rescue vessel and would be the last ship to leave in the event of an evacuation. It was within a few miles of the well site Thursday morning.

Just days before the expected completion of a relief well designed to permanently throttle the free-flowing crude, the government's spill chief said Wednesday that work was suspended.

Worse yet, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said foul weather could require reopening the cap that has contained the oil for nearly a week, allowing oil to gush into the sea again for days while engineers wait out the storm.

"This is necessarily going to be a judgment call," said Allen, who was waiting to see how the storm developed before deciding whether to order any of the ships and crews stationed some 50 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico to head for safety.

The cluster of thunderstorms passed over Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Wednesday, and forecasters said the system would probably move into the Gulf over the weekend. They gave it a 40 percent chance of becoming a tropical depression or a tropical storm by Friday.