Good news for investigators: After almost 30 hours of work, BP’s 50-foot, 300-ton blowout preventer was raised to the surface on Saturday from more than mile below the sea’s surface. Meanwhile, 137 people waited aboard the Helix Q4000 vessel—FBI agents among them—to escort the massive fixture to a NASA facility in Louisiana for analysis. So far, investigators know that a bubble of methane gas escaped from the well, causing the accident, but what they don’t know is why—or how—it happened. The retrieved Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer could possibly help answer those questions.
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