From BP's War Room

The latest on stopping the flow of oil from that spill in the Gulf:

BP, based in London, won’t know until Tuesday whether its plan to contain the leaking oil within a 40-foot-tall steel structure will work as planned, Bob Fryar, a senior BP executive, said. If it works, the container BP calls a dome will capture about 85 percent of the flow, which will be siphoned to the surface by a mile-long pipe.

Fryar, senior vice president of BP’s exploration and production business in Angola, is one of dozens of executives and engineers toiling in a tightly secured warren of offices on the third floor of one of BP’s buildings in suburban Houston, where the work of trying to manage the spill goes on 24 hours a day.

Fryar said 400 to 500 people are working at the center, with 60 percent coming from BP and the rest from other oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, private companies and U.S. agencies.

While people are tired from long, pressure-filled days, the spirit in the crisis room is positive, Fryar said. The engineers enjoy the challenge of working on new problems, though they haven’t been able to stop the leak yet.

This reminds me of the scenes at NASA Mission Control in Apollo 13, only now the stakes are even higher.