More BP and Government Screw Ups In The Gulf

Here we are over 50 days into the Gulf oil spill disaster and the incompetency of BP and Federal government continue to pile up. The most glaring problem, obviously, is the fact that neither BP or the government have figured out how to totally cap the well and stop the flow of crude into the waters of the Gulf. While disastrous, what is done is done. What is just as disastrous, is what is not being done to contain the damage.

Consider two articles from the the Tampa Tribune today, Sunday, June 13, 2010. The first was written by Richard Mullins and was titled "Helping Hands Tied On Oil Spill." Some of the highlights (or lowlights):

• According to Mr. Mullins, there does not appear to be any single organization, private sector, charitable, or government, coordinating donations and volunteers wanting to help out.
• As an example, the article cites Peter Demarie of Delaware who wants to contribute both money and his personal time to help out. He has spent days calling different entities and cannot find anyone who will accept his offers of help. He has called BP many times, the Coast Guard, local Gulf mayors, Greenpeace and others but no one can find any opportunity for him to help out.
• According to an expert, Jeff Capanigro, a crisis communications specialist in Tampa, the whole volunteer situation is a mess. And this mess is still in place more than 50 days after the well blew up. It is not like it just happened yesterday and the recovery effort has not yet begun, it should have begun over seven weeks ago.
• BP will only use trained personnel for the cleanup but training takes only four hours. The bigger problem is the lack of direction for people on how to volunteer for cleanup duty, partly because a lot of the cleanup work has been outsourced to contractors. Further complicating that situation is that in some states, by law, the subcontractors are required to only hire the unemployed or a local resident directly affected by the spill.

Consider another article, this one by Conn Carroll of the Heritage Foundation. He writes:

• Five weeks ago, officials from a Florida Gulf county, Escambia, asked for permission to use a sand skimmer which is a device pulled behind a tractor that collects tar and oil from the top three feet of sand. The officials have not heard back yet because they sent the request to the Unified Command Center in Alabama, the request was then reviewed by BP and then reviewed by the Federal government and then reviewed by the Army Corps Of Engineers and then reviewed by the Coast Guard.
• This sad tale of not being kept in the loop by many of the state, county, and local governments along the Gulf has apparently been repeated many times over the past weeks, according to Mr. Carroll.
• Thirteen countries have offered to help with the oil spill, many of whom are experienced in dealing with this type of disaster. The Obama administration has turned them all down.
• According to one Dutch newspaper, the European companies experienced in this type of disaster could clean up the Gulf in just four months while the Obama administration has estimated it will take the Federal government nine months by doing it themselves (and we all know how bad government estimates can be.)
• Even if the Obama administration wanted to use foreign resources to help in the cleanup, an old law on the books would prohibit such help unless the waiver portion of the law was put into effect, like it was done for the Katrina cleanup. So far, Obama and the Democrats controlling Congress have not moved to put the waiver in place. Thus, even if the administration should reverse itself and accept foreign help, more time would be lost waiting for the waiver to go into effect.

The list of incompetence goes on and on. Both BP and the Federal government still have no plan in place on how to deal with the destruction form the spill. Turning down help, from both Americans and foreign experts, makes no sense. This is further proof that the American political class is really not good at anything except getting themselves re-elected. The scary part is that this is a very tangible, a very identifiable problem and the government cannot even handle this one finite problem. You can imagine how poorly they handle the more nebulous, open ended issues like health care, public education failures, drug addiction, etc., problems that are much more wide spread and less clearly defined.

As I read the papers and other news sources, I still see no evidence that politicians sitting on Congressional committees responsible for all aspects of this disaster have visited the Gulf, except for those whose home districts and states are affected. Much like the military hospital embarrassment several years ago when returning wounded soldiers were forced to stay in very substandard military medical facilities, it does not appear that those Congressional representatives supposedly guiding both the Gulf activities or the hospital situation are really engaged in finding solutions, having never visited the Gulf since the spill disaster began or stepped inside an armed forces hospital before that crisis arose. Otherwise, maybe a Congressional committee by now would have stepped up and started coordinating recovery plans.

These Congressional members would be removed from their committee posts if Step 34 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" was in effect. Somebody in Congress needs to be held accountable, whether it is for the lack of contingency planning for the disaster, the lax oversight of the Federal employees in the Interior Department responsible for drilling safety, or the lack of emergency coordination after the spill.

One last note, also from Mr. Carroll's article. According to his research, as provided by the Center For Responsive Politics, President Obama "was the largest recipient of campaign contributions from BP and its employees over the past 20 years." Can you imagine if the preceding statement had "George Bush" as the subject of the sentence and not "President Obama." The Democrats and liberal mainstream press would have gone ballistic. However, Bush has not been the largest single recipient of BP-related campaign funds, Obama has. Proving my theory in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" that there really is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, the labels they choose may be different but they all belong to the exclusive club known as the American political class. And we all suffer because of it.


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