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BP crews have made hasty preparations to protect the damaged Gulf of Mexico oil well from a looming storm, forcing them to halt work on plugging the damaged wellbore.
"We are having to watch the weather very, very carefully now and adjust our plans accordingly," BP senior vice president Kent Wells told reporters.
Anxiously eyeing the bad weather brewing in the Caribbean to see if it could become a tropical storm and veer towards the Gulf, US and BP officials pored over data mulling whether to order an evacuation.
The National Hurricane Center downgraded an earlier forecast saying there was now a 40 percent chance instead of a 50 percent chance of the system "becoming a tropical cyclone in the next 48 hours".
But in case it has to evacuate the area around the damaged well, which lies some 80km off the Louisiana coast, BP early Wednesday placed a special plug inside the well's casing.
The well has been capped since Thursday, and the plug, dubbed "a storm packer," was "another barrier, so that nothing can flow up or down past that plug... so that if we have to leave we have multiple barriers," Wells said.
Any storm would be a frustrating setback as the British energy giant may be within days of permanently plugging the well, which began leaking after an April 20 explosion.
