OIL SPILL

Awaiting Results of Top Kill

Does not seem to have made things worse.

No one can be sure whether the top kill is working yet, but at the very least it doesn’t seem to be making things worse. Even though some of the mud that is being pumped into the blown-out well is coming straight back up, there is a chance that the gushing into the Gulf of Mexico could be stopped over the weekend. "The fact that we had a bunch of mud going up the riser isn't ideal but it's not necessarily indicative of a problem," a BP spokesman said. After an initial 18-hour delay, the operation to clog the leak finally resumed Thursday evening. Still, the response is certainly more organized now than it was in the moments after the rig exploded. An investigation by The Wall Street Journal shows that it was completely unprepared to handle an emergency. Panic took over and "There was no chain of command,” one worker reported, “Nobody in charge."