• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

NYT:U.S. Missed Chances to Act on Oil Spill

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
U.S. Missed Chances to Act on Oil Spill
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and ERIC LIPTON

NEW ORLEANS — As oil edged toward the Louisiana coast and fears continued to grow that the leak from a seabed oil well could spiral out of control, the White House announced that President Obama would visit the region on Sunday morning.

Officials did not provide additional details. Mr. Obama, who was in Michigan on Saturday morning to give a commencement address, is scheduled to return to Washington for the White House Correspondents Dinner that evening.

On Saturday morning, rough seas and brisk southeasterly winds prevented crews from continuing the clean-up efforts.

“It’s just the weather holding them up right now,” the Coast Guard spokesman Cory Mendenhall told The Associated Press. “They’re looking at 6- to 9-foot seas. Once they can, they’ll resume.”

And because of the spread of the spill, the Minerals Management Service said on Saturday that two Gulf of Mexico drilling platforms have stopped natural gas production and one was evacuated as a safety measure.

Overnight on Friday, crews dumped 3,000 gallons of sub-surface dispersant at a rate of nine gallons per minute. According to a Coast Guard statement, officials were still evaluating its success.

The Obama administration has publicly chastised BP America for its handling of the spreading oil gusher, yet a review of the response suggests it may be too simplistic to place all the blame for the unfolding environmental catastrophe on the oil company. The federal government also had opportunities to move more quickly, but did not do so while it waited for a resolution to the spreading spill from BP.

The Department of Homeland Security waited until Thursday to declare that the incident was “a spill of national significance,” and then set up a second command center in Mobile, Ala. The actions came only after the estimate of the size of the spill was increased fivefold to 5,000 barrels a day.

The delay meant that the Homeland Security Department waited until late this week to formally request a more robust response from the Department of Defense, with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano acknowledging even as late as Thursday afternoon that she did not know if the Defense Department even had equipment that might be helpful.

By Friday afternoon, she said, the Defense Department had agreed to send two large military transport planes to spray chemicals that can disperse the oil while it is still in the Gulf.

Officials initially seemed to underestimate the threat of a leak, just as BP did last year when it told the government such an event was highly unlikely. Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry, the chief Coast Guard official in charge of the response, said on April 22, after the rig sank, that the oil that was on the surface appeared to be merely residual oil from the fire, though she said it was unclear what was going on underwater. The day after, officials said that it appeared the well’s blowout preventer had kicked in and that there did not seem to be any oil leaking from the well, though they cautioned it was not a guarantee.

BP officials, even after the oil leak was confirmed by using remote-controlled robots, expressed confidence that the leak was slow enough, and steps taken out in the Gulf of Mexico aggressive enough, that the oil would never reach the coast.

On Friday, the company drew sharp new criticism from federal officials for not stopping the leak and cleaning up the spill before it reached land. They called the oil company’s current resources inadequate.

“It is clear that after several unsuccessful attempts to secure the source of the leak, it is time for BP to supplement their current mobilization as the slick of oil moves toward shore,” Ms. Napolitano said pointedly.

Geoffrey S. Morrell, deputy assistant secretary of defense, said in a statement that the government would hold BP accountable for the cost of the department’s deployment, which as of Friday night included the Louisiana National Guard to help clean up coastal areas once the oil comes ashore.

Meanwhile, one official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a widely distributed warning on Friday, said the oil flow could grow from the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day to “an order of magnitude higher than that.” The NOAA document, first obtained by The Press-Register in Mobile, was described by an agency spokesman as simply a possibility raised by a staff member, not an official prediction.

Some oil industry critics questioned whether the federal government is too reliant on oil companies to manage the response to major spills, leaving the government unable to evaluate if the response is robust enough.

“Here you have the company that is responsible for the accident leading the response to the crisis,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. “There is a problem here, and the consequence is clear.”

But it is still the government, in this case the Coast Guard, that has the final say. A law passed a year after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster makes the owner of a rig or vessel responsible for cleaning up a spill. But oversight of the cleanup is designated to the Coast Guard, with advice from other federal agencies.

Rear Adm. Robert C. North, retired, who was commander of the Coast Guard’s Eighth District from 1994 to 1996, said that decisions in these situations are made collectively, but that the buck essentially stops with the federal coordinator — in this case, Admiral Landry. “The federal on-scene coordinator is kind of the one individual to say, ‘I think we need to do more’ or ‘That’s adequate,’ ” he said.

If the government determines that the responsible party is not up to the job, it can federalize the spill, running the cleanup operations without the private company but billing it for the cost. This is a last resort, however. In this case, Admiral North said, the oil companies have more technology and expertise than the government. “It doesn’t appear that federalizing it would bring in any more resources,” he said.

Officials from BP and the federal government have repeatedly said they had prepared for the worst, even though a plan filed last year with the government said it was highly unlikely that a spill or leak would ever result from the Deep Horizon rig.

“There are not much additional available resources in the world to fight this thing offshore,” said Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, in an interview. “We’ve basically thrown everything we have at it.”

Mr. Suttles said BP’s efforts did not change after it was disclosed Wednesday night that the leak was estimated at 5,000 barrels a day, five times larger than initial estimates had suggested. He said BP, which is spending roughly $6 million a day and will likely spend far more when oil reaches land, had already been mobilizing for a far larger spill. However, he did not deny that BP initially thought the slick could be stopped before it reached the coastline.

“In the early days, the belief was that we probably could have contained it offshore,” Mr. Suttles said. “Unfortunately, since the event began we haven’t had that much good weather.”

The first weekend after the sinking of the rig, choppy seas brought the cleanup to a near halt, and made more complicated tactics like controlled burns impossible. But even after the weather cleared — and just a few days before officials began acknowledging the likelihood of landfall — Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, expressed confidence the spill could be contained.

Adm. Thad W. Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard, said Friday that he agreed the situation was catastrophic and could continue to unfold for up to three months, but he said he remained satisfied with his team’s response, saying that even if it had initially known that the leak was 5,000 barrels a day, the response would have been the same.

“While it may not have been visible to the public, from the very start, we have been working this very hard,” he said.

Within a matter of hours of the report of the explosion, the Coast Guard had dispatched three cutters, four helicopters and a plane to the scene, helping to save 90 workers, including three critically injured ones who were sent by helicopter for emergency care.

“We have never tried so many different methods for a large spill on the surface as we have during this, and I have been doing oil spill response for 30 years,” Admiral Allen said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/us/02gulf.html?hp
 

Faster horses

Well-known member
This is some more of BO's "we're working on it".
He's a humilation.

But he and his greenie friends will find a way to use this
against the citizens of the USA. Wanna bet?
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Faster horses said:
This is some more of BO's "we're working on it".
He's a humilation.

But he and his greenie friends will find a way to use this
against the citizens of the USA. Wanna bet?

Never let a crisis go to waste. Use it to your advance your agenda.

What's their agenda?


Distribute wealth through Climate Change legislation?
 

burnt

Well-known member
I don't care who you are this is just a huge disaster. Depending on the winds and current, it will reach up the Eastern U.S. coastline. :shock:
 

Larrry

Well-known member
Angusgord said:
Faster horses said:
This is some more of BO's "we're working on it".
He's a humilation.

But he and his greenie friends will find a way to use this
against the citizens of the USA. Wanna bet?
I find some of you poster's humilating ,the oil spill is a cluster F%&k ,blaming it on whoever you want doesn't make it so

And ignoring the fact bo sat on it for nine days does not automatically make it Bush's fault. You libs need to get a life
 

Faster horses

Well-known member
Angusgord, I find your potty mouth and your spelling humiliating, and
I think Obama has humiliated all of the US citizens with his actions.
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Angusgord said:
Faster horses said:
Angusgord, I find your potty mouth and your spelling humiliating, and
I think Obama has humiliated all of the US citizens with his actions.
Well you complete a'hole ,maybe take a look at your own spelling ,then you'll see where I was coming from. As for Obama humiliating the country ,maybe take a look at Bush during Katrina and then come back and tell me about a president being a black eye to our country

Maybe big Government doesn't work so well. What do you think?

They have all these procedures in place, but never seem to get anything done on time. Might as well have them look after Health Care too.
 

katrina

Well-known member
Angusgord said:
Faster horses said:
Angusgord, I find your potty mouth and your spelling humiliating, and
I think Obama has humiliated all of the US citizens with his actions.
Well you complete a'hole ,maybe take a look at your own spelling ,then you'll see where I was coming from. As for Obama humiliating the country ,maybe take a look at Bush during Katrina and then come back and tell me about a president being a black eye to our country

Come on Macon!!! Lets dump this creep!!!
 

Larrry

Well-known member
As for Obama humiliating the country ,maybe take a look at Bush during Katrina and then come back and tell me about a president being a black eye to our country

I did look, yup oblahblah is a black eye........and that is being kind to the foreigner
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Why didn't federal officials implement an oil spill clean up plan they've had on the books since 1994 as soon as possible after crude began pumping into the Gulf of Mexico following the explosion and sinking of BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform 53 miles south of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico?

The Mobile Register reports that Ron Gouget, who formerly managed the oil spill cleanup department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as a similar unit for the state of Louisiana, is criticizing the Obama White House's failure to act according to existing government plans in the event of a spill in the area now being deluged with thousands of barrels of crude oil every day.

Gouget said when he was at NOAA, the agency created a plan that required burning off an oil spill in the region in its earliest stage, if the prevailing winds would not push the smoke and soot from the operation inland. The plan is still in effect, but was not activated last week by NOAA.

"They had pre-approval. The whole reason the plan was created was so we could pull the trigger right away instead of waiting ten days to get permission," Gouget told the Register. "If you read the pre-approval plan, it speaks about Grand Isle, where the spill is. When the wind is blowing offshore out of the north, you have preapproval to burn in that region. If the wind is coming onshore, like it is now, you can't burn at Grand Isle. They waited to do the test burn until the wind started coming onshore."

When the Register asked Gouget why federal officials waited for a week before conducting even a test burn, he said, "Good question. Maybe complacency was the biggest issue. They probably didn't have the materials on hand to conduct the burn, which is unconscionable."

Gouget told the Registe that NOAA officials at the Unified Command Center in Louisiana know how to respond to spills, and know burning should have started as soon as possible after the initial release was detected. He also speculated that they may have been prevented from doing so by higher officials.

"It may have been a political issue. The burn would make a big big plume and lots of soot. Like Valdez, the decisions to get the resources mobilized may not have occurred until it was too late," Gouget told the Register. "This whole thing has been a daily strip tease. At first they thought it was just the diesel, then they said the well wasn't leaking. It's unfortunate they didn't get the burning going right away. They could have gotten 90 percent of the oil before it spread."

You can read the full Register story here.

Meanwhile, Doug Ross, who first directed my attention to the Register story, further points out that much of the White House response thus far seems calculated to make trial lawyers happy, not find a solution to the crisis:

"But the White House response has consisted of dispatching lawyers to New Orleans and shutting down other rigs that have nothing to do with the BP disaster. On April 30th - 10 days after the catastrophic explosion - the oil and gas news site RigZone reported that the White House had forbidden new drilling."

You can read the rest of Doug's post here.

And by the way, has nobody thought to ask the White House about the possibility of environmental terrorism being involved in this disaster? After all, the Environmental Liberation Front has been cited as a significant domestic terrorism threat by the FBI as recently as 2008.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Former-NOAA-oil-spill-cleanup-boss-says-Obama-waited-too-long-in-Gulf-disaster--92631189.html#ixzz0mpQ0WaLy
 
Top