(06-05) 04:00 PDT Houston - --

After devastating failures to rein in an escalating disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, BP offered a fatigued and skeptical nation a sliver of hope Friday, saying it had attached a new containment cap to a spewing well and was capturing some crude.

Work continued into the night to shut four vents at the top of the containment device that were still allowing thousands of barrels of oil to billow into the gulf, feeding a spill that is smothering seabirds, fouling marshes and beaches and crippling coastal economies. The impact spread Friday to the sugar-white beaches of Florida's Panhandle, where tar balls began washing ashore.

BP still does not know how much the containment device will collect from the well, which is gushing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day - at least half a million gallons - according to government estimates. Some is expected to continue seeping from a seal connecting the cap to the well even if the system can be optimized.

"I am encouraged, but we must remember we now have 12 hours' experience with this. It's never been done at 5,000 feet before," Kent Wells, BP's senior vice president for exploration and production, said Friday.

Tapping into the frustration, fear and outrage of Gulf Coast residents, President Obama visited the region for the second time in eight days on Friday to meet with retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, gulf state governors and local people affected by the spill.

Ad campaign ripped

"This has been a disaster for this region, and people are understandably frightened and concerned about what the next few months and the next few years may hold," Obama said in Kenner, La. He also bashed BP for spending $50 million on an advertising campaign and for considering dividend payments to shareholders in the midst of the crisis.

As the government's environmental response entered its 46th day on Friday, Allen and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said emergency funds to pay for their efforts were running low, and asked Congress to transfer more money from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. The spill fund is collected from oil producers via a 5-cent-per-barrel tax on oil.

As of June 1, the government has spent more than $93 million of emergency funds on response efforts, all of which ultimately will be reimbursed by BP.

BP's efforts

BP, which is responsible by law for paying for the spill cleanup as the owner of the well, said Friday that it had spent more than $1 billion on the response, including cleanup efforts and the drilling of two relief wells.

CEO Tony Hayward also said the company will spin off a new, stand-alone company to deal with the long-term spill response and announced the appointment of BP managing director Bob Dudley, an American, to run it.

Back in Houston, BP's Wells said operators were working with submersible robots to close the chimney-like vents and slowly increase the flow of oil and gas through the containment device attached via pipe to a surface ship, in the latest attempt to contain the spill.

Wells could not say how much oil was being captured, but Allen said earlier Friday oil was flowing up at a rate of about 1,000 barrels a day, or 4,200 gallons.

Should the effort fail, Wells said several other containment caps are positioned on the seabed and could be tried next. And a manifold system used last week in a failed attempt to plug the well is being reconfigured to help suck oil out through the blowout preventer, a stack of valves atop the wellhead. Those valves failed to function when a blowout occurred April 20, causing an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 people and triggered the spill.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This article appeared on page A - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle