WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama wrested a $20 billion compensation guarantee and an apology to the nation from British oil giant BP Wednesday, announcing the company would set up a major claims fund for shrimpers, restaurateurs and others whose lives and livelihoods are being wrecked by the oil flooding into the Gulf of Mexico.

Applause broke out during a community meeting in Orange Beach, Ala., on the news.

“We asked for that two weeks ago and they laughed at us,” Mayor Tony Kennon said.

“Thank you, President Obama, for taking a bunch of rednecks’ suggestion and making it happen.”

Obama had said he would “make BP pay,” and the company’s chairman said after four hours of intense White House negotiations that BP was ready.

The unending oil spill saga had yielded almost no good news before this. Creation of the fund — to be run by an administrator with a proven track record — is the first big success Obama has been able to give to Gulf residents and the nation in the eight weeks since the explosion, a period during which the spill has taken ever more of the public’s attention, threatening anything else the president hoped to focus on or accomplish.

Huge as the $20 billion seems, both Obama and London-based BP PLC said it was by no means a cap.

The deal also adhered to what Obama had said was his non-negotiable demand: that the fund and the claims process be administered independently from BP. It won’t be a government fund, either, but will be led by the administration’s “pay czar,” Kenneth Feinberg, better known as the man who oversaw the $7 billion government fund for families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.