Tar Balls Wash Up in Fla. as Obama Heads Back to Gulf

(June 4) -- Tar balls suspected from America's worst-ever oil spill began washing up on the Florida panhandle's pristine white beaches this morning, while BP said a containment dome is capturing some of oil gushing from its underwater well.

President Barack Obama, who canceled another overseas trip to deal with the crisis, is heading back to the Gulf Coast today.

ABC News aired video of lumps of semi-solid oil littering Pensacola Beach, but it's not yet confirmed that they're from the BP spill. "To hear that there is oil there is one of the most disturbing things that we could imagine," Florida Gov. Charlie Crist told ABC's "Good Morning America."

Crist said he flew over the panhandle on Thursday in a National Guard helicopter and spotted an oil sheen offshore, but that the tar balls are even more recent. "Florida depends largely on our tourist industry and this past weekend, the beaches were beautiful," he said. "The water was clean."

Meanwhile, BP has lowered a containment cap over the blown-out well in hopes of siphoning some of the gushing crude up into a tanker floating on the water's surface. But it could be another 24 hours before engineers can tell whether the operation has worked.

"There is flow coming up the pipe. Just now, I don't know the exact rate," BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, told NBC's "Today" show. "I'm actually pretty confident this is going to work. It probably won't capture all of the flow, but it should capture the vast majority," he also told ABC.

The cap was fitted overnight after BP used underwater robots and a pair of giant 20-foot shears to snip off the end of the jagged well pipe through which oil has been fouling the Gulf of Mexico since April 20. Since then, as many as 800,000 gallons of oil have been spewing out 50 miles off the Louisiana coast each day, making the spill the largest in U.S. history.

Asked whether the cap could bring the amount of oil spillage down below 1,000 barrels a day, Suttles told ABC: "I'd expect so." That would be a nearly 95 percent reduction from what's currently gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico.

But authorities are warning that the only surefire way to completely halt the oil flow is by drilling two relief wells nearby, to tap into the same underground oil pocket and relieve pressure from the blown-out well. BP began drilling those wells last month but won't be finished until August.

"Even if successful, this is only a temporary and partial fix, and we must continue our aggressive response operations at the source, on the surface and along the gulf's precious coastline," U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said in a statement, referring to BP's containment cap operation.

Obama canceled a trip to Australia and Indonesia -- for the second time this year -- to deal with the crisis. Today, he travels back to the gulf for his second trip to the oil-fouled coast in eight days.

His trip abroad had been scheduled to begin next weekend, but the White House says Obama called his counterparts from those two nations Thursday night to cancel.

Earlier Thursday, the president made some of his most fiery comments yet about BP, saying he hasn't seen "the kind of rapid response" he'd hoped for from the company. And Obama said BP has already "felt his anger" over the spill.

"This is imperiling an entire way of life and an entire region for potentially years," Obama told CNN's Larry King.