Oil Spill Panel Slams Obama’s Gulf Clean-Up
No one should be surprised at the disclosure of stumbling and bumbling that took place in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, as documented in staff reports released by President Obama’s oil spill commission.
Given the magnitude of the disaster, the many players involved and their colliding agendas, the fog of battle, and the turbulent eddies of misinformation stirred up by today’s frantic media cycle, it would have been a bigger surprise if the oil spill commission had put out reports stating that everything went swimmingly.
Lines of authority were confused. What do you expect when a lumbering beast the size of the federal government gets involved?
Political appointees tried to show that they were on top of the situation. Administrations come and go, but the principle of CYA lives forever.
Lack of transparency clouded the federal government’s meandering estimates on how much oil was pouring into the gulf. As Dr. McCoy said in Star Trek IV, “the bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.”
BP had a strong interest in limiting information about the magnitude of the spill, given the potentially gigantic civil liability the company still faces. Say, Congressman Barton, still want to apologize to BP?
A few lessons are initially apparent from the commission reports.
First, the risks of producing hydrocarbons in remote, difficult environments should never be played down, and rosy statements to the contrary should never be believed.
Take the Chukchi Sea off northwestern Alaska, where Shell plans to do some exploratory drilling. The difficulties of responding to an oil spill in a polar environment worlds removed from the warm Gulf are not trivial, as one of the reports points out. If a spill were to happen during the winter, weeks could pass in which a response would be impossible as a result of dangerously frigid temperatures. Finding spilled oil smeared under and around ice floes would be problematic. Booms would be hard to deploy around broken ice. Skimmers could clog up. Dispersants might not work well in cold water.
Second, full transparency is a must. When a big spill occurs, public confidence depends on knowing fully what’s going on. Statements from government officials should detail what their estimates and assertions are based on, uncertainties should be spelled out, and room should be made for independent experts to challenge the official line.
During the Gulf spill, government estimates of the spill rate were a moving target. The initial estimate of 1,000 barrels per day – some 60 times less than the final estimate - included no detail on what it was based on, and according to one of the reports, apparently was taken from BP at face value with no supporting documentation.
The next estimate, 5,000 barrels per day, apparently was derived from the work of a NOAA scientist who laced the number with heavy caveats. Yet the feds stuck with that number for a full month. As one of the commission staff reports put it, “the government appears to have taken an overly casual approach to the calculation and release of the 5,000 bbls/day estimate.”
Third, the feds have to do a better job of building trust with state and local governments and integrate them into planning for spill responses. It’s their coastline and marine waters too. What a commission report described colorfully as “boom wars” were a proxy for communications breakdowns and infighting that resulted in misallocation of resources during the spill response.
Following orders to “keep the parishes happy,” for example, the Coast Guard placed booms in places where they wouldn’t have done much good, such as passes with fast tidal currents.
There will be more reports from the commission that will shed additional light on the spill. In any event, the Obama administration has plenty to answer for. That will provide lots of candy for Beltway chatter about the potential political fallout. Much more important is what will be learned and what Congress will do during its next outbreak of governance.