Even after the leaking well is permanently sealed, the Deepwater Horizon drama won’t be anywhere near over. Just in Thursday’s BP oil spill update, the MMS director is out, the spill is resized, and hearings proliferate on Capitol Hill.

So far, so good is the word as America waits for the results of the so-called top kill gambit to cork the runaway Deepwater Horizon wellhead.

After weeks of preparation and risk-weighing, BP received the OK from Washington on Wednesday to start pumping thousands of gallons of heavy mud into an inoperable wellhead in an attempt to stem a leak that’s been spilling as many as 19,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico. As of Thursday morning, the mud mix had stopped the oil and gas flow, and engineers prepared to further plug the hole using rubber debris before attempting to cap the well with cement.

“We’ll get this under control,” Coast Guard Commander Thad Allen told the Los Angeles Times.

. . .

“There’s going to be tremendous lessons out of this. We’re going to see much more by-the-book operations,” says Edward Glab, an oil industry expert at Florida International University in Miami. “It will absolutely make drilling safer in the future.”

Read: “BP oil spill update: Smooth sailing for ‘top kill,’ MMS director ousted,“ an article from the The Christian Science Monitor.