Capt. Demi Shaffer pilots the Joe Griffin as it enters the Gulf of Mexico carrying the containment vessel to the rig collapse site which will be used to try to contain the Deepwater Horizon oil, Wednesday, May 5, 2010. (AP Photo / Gerald Herbert)

By The Associated Press
May 16, 2010, 9:35AM BP was wrestling for a third day Sunday with its latest contraption for slowing the nearly month-old gusher of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. BP, the largest oil and gas producer in the U.S., has been unable to thread a tube into the leak to siphon the crude to a tanker, its third approach to stopping or reducing the spill on the ocean floor nearly a mile  below the surface. Engineers remotely steering robot submersibles were trying again Sunday to fit the tube into a breach in a seafloor pipe, BP said. … The Associated Press has learned that an independent firm hired by BP substantiated the complaints in 2009 and found that the company was violating its own policies by not having completed engineering documents on board the Atlantis when it began operating in 2007. Word of huge submerged oil plumes, meanwhile, raised the specter of more damage to the ecologically rich Gulf. It also adds to questions about when large amounts of crude might hit shore. “It’s just a matter of time … and the first significant amount of oil is going to show up around the U.S,” said Hans Graber, director of the University of Miami’s satellite sensing facility, who has been tracking the oil slick. Researchers from the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology said Saturday they had detected the underwater oil plumes at depths between just beneath the surface to more than 4,000 feet (1,200 meters). Three or four large plumes have been found, including one at least 10 miles (16 kilometers) long and a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide, said Samantha Joye, a marine science professor at the University of Georgia. Researchers Vernon Asper and Arne Dierks said in Web posts that the plumes were “perhaps due to the deep injection of dispersants which BP has stated that they are conducting.” BP has won government approval to use chemicals on the oil near where it is gushing to break it up before it rises to the surface. The researchers were also testing the effects of large amounts of subsea oil on oxygen levels in the water. The oil can deplete oxygen in the water, harming plankton and other tiny creatures that serve as food for a wide variety of sea creatures. Oxygen levels in some areas have dropped 30 percent, and should continue to drop, Joye said. “It could take years, possibly decades, for the system to recover from an infusion of this quantity of oil and gas,” Joye said. “We’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s impossible to fathom the impact.” …

BP wrestling for third day Sunday to plug Gulf of Mexico oil leak, spill