Dave Cohen

A federal judge in New Orleans has overturned a moratorium on deepwater oil drilling, instituted by President Obama at the end of May. The judge said the Interior Department's decision to suspend drilling in the Gulf was arbitrary. Obama, on Tuesday, vowed to appeal the decision.

Today, BP will try to pour cement down the leaking well to plug it up and pave it over, but pouring cement 5,000 feet beneath the ocean is a bit more complicated than laying a sidewalk.

For more on the top kill procedure, we're joined by WWL reporter Dave Cohen. And Dr. Peter Clark, a petroleum engineer with the University of Alabama.

Yesterday, a rare piece of positive news came from the BP camp when they announced that engineers were successful in their attempt to siphon off some of the millions of gallons of crude oil still leaking from the Deepwater Horizon well site in the Gulf of Mexico. But, even as they admit that the procedure of threading a four inch diameter tube through the broken pipe is successfully pulling out some of the oil, this isn’t a complete solution to the region's environmental catastrophe

Last night at around 8:00 p.m. the "Joe Griffin," a 280-foot container boat, left Port Fourchoun, Louisiana for a fifty mile trip to the site of the collapsed Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Last week’s vast oil spill just 50 miles into the Gulf of Mexico is already being called one of the most significant oil spills in U.S History; and yesterday, President Obama and the White House made it clear that they have moved clean up efforts to the top of their priority list.  

It looks like the Gulf of Mexico has averted a major ecological disaster after an oil rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana on Tuesday night. A large fire caused the rig to capsize and sink yesterday and officials worried that crude oil could seep into the water. Eleven crew members are still missing and the time frame for their survival is now believed to have passed. But news this morning suggests that at least part of the disaster may have been averted.

Survivors of Tuesday night's explosion on an offshore oil rig in Louisiana are still arriving home this morning, but the incident still has U.S. Coast Guard personnell searching for 11 people, and seven are critically injured. The fire on the BP-owned rig still burns out of control, spewing crude oil into the air so powerfully that it can be seen from the Louisiana coast. How unusual are these occurances, and what have we learned about the cause of this giant explosion and fire?

Most sports fans will watch the Super Bowl next weekend, but Dave Cohen, news director at WWL Radio, the flagship station of the New Orleans Saints, talks about why the team's run to the championship is about more than just football for his hometown.