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Fail! Top kill can’t stop BP’s devil

On to Plan Z.

Efforts to stop the massive oil leak beneath the Gulf of Mexico were stymied once again yesterday after the much-hoped-for “Top Kill” fix failed — sending officials scrambling back to the drawing board.

“This scares everybody, the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing,” BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said on the 40th day of the leak that has already spilled as much as 40 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.

The combined “Top Kill” and “Junk Shot” effort — which involved pumping heavy drilling mud and debris like golf balls and rubber tires to gum up the pipes of the fractured well — began Wednesday, and officials had held out high hopes that it would stop the stubborn spill.

VIDEO: SEE THE OIL SPILL LIVE FEED

VIDEO: BP ANNOUNCES FAILURE

They said it would take up to 48 hours to know if they had made any headway, but while they funneled as much as 2,700 gallons of mud into the well per minute, it was unclear how much was staying inside.

Video footage of the leak 5,000 feet underwater made it seem as if much of the mud was being blasted back out. By yesterday, the flow appeared to have returned to being primarily oil.

“I am disappointed this operation did not work,” said BP CEO Tony Haward. “The team executed the operation perfectly and the technology worked without a single hitch.”

BP will now revert back to a containment strategy to stop the environmental disaster that began when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers.

The first step in the “lower marine riser package” would involve cutting off the damaged riser pipe from which the oil is leaking and capping it with a containment valve that is currently resting on the sea floor.

That could take as long as a week.

Experts called the procedure a risky move because there’s a bend in the damaged riser that may be restricting the flow of oil, and installing a new valve could lead to more leaking.

“If they can’t get that valve on, things will get much worse,” said Philip W. Johnson, an engineering professor at the University of Alabama.

At the same time, workers continued to drill relief wells that would divert the flow, but those could take until August to complete.

The Top Kill failure was the latest in several setbacks BP has suffered in its efforts to stop the leak.

Efforts to robotically trigger failed cutoff valves on top of the drilling site failed in the days after the rig sank April 22.

In early May, BP lowered a 100-ton containment dome over the leak, but it failed to work when ice crystals that formed due to the frigid deep water plugged up the works.

The next step involved threading a 6-inch-wide pipe into the larger leaking pipe to suction up some of the oil into an oil tanker overhead, but it has had only limited success.

BP officials had expressed optimism about Top Kill, putting its chance of success at 60 to 70 percent. But as the days passed, outside experts grew skeptical.

“It’s obvious that the baby’s spitting the baby food back,” said Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied offshore drilling for 55 years.

The oil spill — which has now ballooned into the largest in American history — threatens damage far beyond the fragile wetlands of the Mississippi River’s delta, and has developed into a major liability for President Obama.

Poll numbers show the public is losing faith in the administration’s response to the spill. Obama paid a three-hour visit to the Louisiana coast Friday to assure people there that they “will not be abandoned.”

“It is as enraging as it is heartbreaking,” the president said yesterday after it was revealed that “Top Kill” had failed.

Before Obama toured an oil-flecked beach, BP trucked in 400 workers to scrub the sand in expectation of his arrival, local officials complained yesterday.

“Just another p.r. stunt by BP to hide our problems from the world,” John Young, chairman of the local parish council, told the Sunday Times of London. “We want these workers here every day, not just when the president calls.”

After the visit, the president joined his family on vacation in Chicago.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said yesterday that while drilling relief wells would ultimately solve the problem, it was not possible to wait for their completion.

Much anger is being directed at BP, which has been accused of being less than transparent in explaining what caused the rig to explode and what it is doing to stop it.

“We’re wondering whether or not they’re attempting to give everybody false hope in order to drag out the time until the ultimate resolution to it” — drilling relief wells, said Chris Roberts, a councilman in Louisiana’s hard-hit Jefferson Parish.

One letter written to the New Orleans Times-Picayune demanded that BP executives be tarred in spilled oil, rolled in blackened pelican feathers and have their heads chopped off to be used as part of the “junk shot” to plug the well.

A protesters’ group urged people to urinate on BP gas stations.

“They leaked on us. It’s time to take a leak on them,” the organizers declared on Facebook.

BP has been particularly hammered for putting out low estimates of how much oil was leaking — at first it said none, then 42,000 gallons a day and then 210,000 gallons, when it is now believed to be much more. The company initially resisted calls to make footage of the leak public.

“From the get-go, every aspect of the situation has been downplayed,” said environmental activist Lorraine Margeson.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said, “These guys either do not have any sense of accountability to the public or they are Neanderthals when it comes to public relations.”

Oh, my gush

April 20 Offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon catches fire following explosion

April 22 Rig sinks, setting off 5,000-foot-deep leak that has since spewed as much as 40 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico

April 24 Robotic attempts to trigger underwater shut-off valves fail

May 7 BP tries to lower a 100-ton containment box over the leak, but it fails

May13 Engineers insert a 6-inch straw down the leaking pipe to limit the flow, but it was never meant as a solution

Yesterday Top Kill” maneuver, in which mud and debris are pumped into the leaking pipe, fails

lukas.alpert@nypost.com