But the containment effort — and the cleanup — aren't finished. Crews that forced in the mud for the "static kill" now must decide whether to follow up by pumping cement down the broken wellhead. Federal officials said they won't declare complete victory until they pump in mud and cement from the bottom to seal the well, a procedure that might not be done for weeks.

"We're in a good place today, but we want to get it permanent over the near term, whether that's days or weeks," said Kent Wells, BP senior vice president, who repeatedly and pointedly avoided saying the static kill had finished the job. Asked when he will be able to say the well is dead, he replied: "I'm looking forward to that day."

An experimental cap had stopped the oil from flowing for the past three weeks, but it was not a permanent solution. Before it was lowered, the government estimates that 172 million gallons of oil had flowed into the Gulf.

And before that, BP tried a series of often-absurd sounding contraptions, raising hopes only to dash them when those efforts failed. They included a giant 100-ton containment box that got clogged with ice-like crystals and the so-called junk shot, an attempt to clog up the well with golf balls and rubber scraps.

The apparent success of the static kill had some along the Gulf curious about why BP waited so long to try it.

"I'm wondering, as smart as the people in the U.S. government are, they couldn't have done this sooner?" asked 78-year-old Willie Jones, a retiree from Baton Rouge, La., who sat in the shade in Pensacola Beach, Fla., while his wife and granddaughter ventured onto the white — and oil free — sand.

But the static kill — also known as bullheading — probably would not have worked without the cap in place. It involved slowly pumping the mud from a ship down lines running to the top of the ruptured well a mile below, and a similar effort failed in May when the mud couldn't overcome the flow of oil.

Workers stopped pumping mud in after about eight hours of static kill work and were monitoring the well to ensure it remained stable, BP said. Everything appeared to be going well Wednesday afternoon.

Charter boat captain Randy Boggs, of Orange Beach, Ala., said he has a hard time believing BP's claims of success with the static kill and similarly dismissed the idea that only a quarter of the oil remains in the Gulf.

"There are still boats out there every day working, finding turtles with oil on them and seeing grass lines with oil in it," said Boggs, 45. "Certainly all the oil isn't accounted for. There are millions of pounds of tar balls and oil on the bottom."