US Watches Top Kill, Waits

Two days after BP began a risky effort to plug its gushing oil well, company officials said the operation was going as planned but offered few details, leaving it up to the millions glued to its "spillcam" to speculate whether the top kill was working. Most experts saw incremental progress at best, though some said the muddy brown color of what's escaping the pipe was a good sign.

That "may in fact mean that there's mud coming up and mud coming down as well," which is better than oil coming out, says one expert. Another suggested leaking drilling mud meant the top kill had had "a slight but not dramatic effect." But for ordinary Americans, the spillcam "made me wonder how I use energy and if this situation could teach us how much energy we use ourselves," says an Indianapolis man who has been checking every hour or so since before the top kill started. "It felt like a historic moment."
(More Deepwater Horizon stories.)