Kinder weather yesterday encouraged response teams to step up efforts to counter a massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, but a wind shift also put the tourist beaches of Florida more at risk.

And the day after President Barack Obama visited the disaster zone on the southern coast of Louisiana and put the blame squarely at the firm's door, BP accepted full responsibility and accepted to pay the cost.

"BP takes responsibility for responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We will clean it up," the British energy giant said, vowing to consider all compensation claims "promptly" and pay them quickly if justified.

An indeterminate amount of crude, estimated to be at least 210,000 gallons a day, has been streaming from the wellhead below the Deepwater Horizon rig that sank on April 22, two days after a massive explosion that killed 11 workers.

Three days of storms grounded chemical dispersant sorties and prevented oil skimming vessels from taking to the high seas to mop up the spreading 200-kilometre by 70-mile slick.

But the forecast has improved and an army of 2,500 responders was looking to take advantage to lay more protective booms, skim up more of the sheen and perhaps relaunch burn-off operations that were trialed last week.

"The weather outlook is for less wind and smaller seas and the wind is from the southwest," said the latest status report from the US coast guard.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.