国际英语新闻：Long road to recover ahead of Gulf coast as spill cap collects more oil

HOUSTON, June 8 (Xinhua) -- Energy giant BP has doubled the amount of oil being captured from the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico but the continuing damage to the environment and regional economy could take years to repair.

SPILL CONTAINMENT

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is overseeing the government's response to the catastrophic spill, told a White House briefing on Monday that a cap on the damaged oil well is now keeping 462,000 gallons (1.75 million liters) of oil a day from leaking into the Gulf, up sharply from amounts of the previous days.

But his figures conflicted slightly with BP's numbers. In a statement, BP put the amount being captured at 466,200 gallons (1.76 million liters). Allen said the government was using its own flow-rate calculations and no longer wanted to rely on those from BP.

A still image from a live BP video feed shows oil gushing from the damaged BP oil well-pipe on June 7, 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The cap on the damaged oil well captured 11,000 barrels of oil in the last 24 hours, U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said Monday, adding that years needed to restore environments and habitats in the polluted waters.

It is estimated that the ruptured oil well is gushing 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons of oil each day. The spill, estimated so far at anywhere from 23 million gallons to 50 million, is already the biggest in U.S. history, dwarfing the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

BP said in a tweet that it collected 316,722 gallons of oil from midnight to noon Monday.

Allen said BP is anticipating moving another ship into the Gulf to help move the collected oil, adding that though BP is making progress, it's too early to celebrate.

"Dealing with the oil spill on the surface is going to go on for a couple of months," he told a news briefing in Washington. "Long-term issues of restoring the environment and the habitats and stuff will be years."

With the arrival of the U.S. hurricane season on June 1, BP and the government are designing an oil-collection system that can suspend cleanup if a hurricane threatens the Gulf and then quickly resume once the danger has passed.

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, owned by Transocean and leased by BP, exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers. The untapped wellhead continues gushing oil into the Gulf.