NEW ORLEANS — Crews hurried to get back to work on plugging BP’s leaky oil well Saturday after Tropical Storm Bonnie fizzled, and engineers hoped for a window of clear weather long enough to stop the gusher for good.
But with peak hurricane season starting in early August, chances are the next big storm is right on Bonnie’s heels.

“We’re going to be playing a cat-and-mouse game for the remainder of the hurricane season,” retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said Saturday.

Sure enough, another disturbance already was brewing in the Caribbean, though forecasters said it wasn’t likely to strengthen into a tropical storm.

In the past 10 years, an average of five named storms have hit the Gulf each hurricane season. This year, two have struck already – Bonnie and Hurricane Alex at the end of June, which delayed cleanup of BP’s massive oil spill for a week even though it didn’t get closer than 500 miles from the well.

“Usually you don’t see the first hurricane statistically until Aug. 10,” said Dennis Feltgen, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “The 2010 hurricane season is running just ahead of a typical pace.”

Bonnie fell apart Saturday before it even reached the Louisiana coast. By then, worries about the storm had pushed back efforts to solidly seal the well by at least a week, said Allen, the government’s point man on the spill and a veteran of the Coast Guard’s rescue mission after Hurricane Katrina.

Completion now looks possible by mid-August, but Allen said he wouldn’t hesitate to order another evacuation based on forecasts similar to the ones for Bonnie, which halted work Wednesday.

“We have no choice but to start well ahead of time if we think the storm track is going to bring gale-force winds, which are 39 mph or above, anywhere close to the well site,” Allen said.

Hurricane season ends Nov. 30.

Even though the evacuation turned out to be short-lived, it revealed a key fact: BP and the federal government are increasingly sure that the temporary plug that has mostly contained the oil for eight days will hold.

They didn’t lose the cap even when they thought they’d lose sight of it during the evacuation, although in the end, the real-time cameras that have given the world a constant view of the ruptured well never stopped rolling.

Ironically, the storm may even have a positive effect. Churning waters could actually help dissipate oil in the water, spreading out the surface slick and breaking up tar balls, said Jane Lubchenco, leader of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Beaches may look cleaner in some areas as the storm surge pulls oil away, though other areas could see more oil washed ashore.

“I think the bottom line is, it’s better than it might have been,” Lubchenco said.

Still, the rough weather hurt the operation to kill the well. Work on the relief tunnel stopped Wednesday, and it will take time to restart.

The rig drilling the relief tunnel that will blast mud into the broken well to permanently seal it started steaming back toward the well 40 miles off the Louisiana coast on Saturday morning.

An Associated Press reporter reached the captain’s telephone line on the vessel Saturday afternoon, and the man who answered the phone confirmed the rig was back at the site. He hung up when asked for his name, and a BP spokesman wouldn’t immediately confirm the rig was back in place.