Former NOAA oil spill cleanup boss says Obama waited too long in Gulf disaster
By: Mark Tapscott
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.
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