Remember when people thought it might a good idea to nuke the well at the height of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico this summer?
Yeah, that was never gonna happen. But not for lack of interest.
So says retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the man who ran the government response to the devastating spill. Allen addressed an audience at the Center For Strategic and International Studies in Washington Tuesday evening, where he laid out the trials and tribulations of being the public face of the efforts to clean up the largest ecological disaster in US history. One of those trials, Allen said, was trying to explain why a military designed to fight wars didn’t have the right equipment to stop an oil spill.
“I had many, many conversations about why the Department of Defense wasn’t brought in to solve this problem,” he said. “I got asked at least on five occasions throughout the course of this thing why we didn’t think about using a nuclear weapon on the well, ok?”
The uncomfortable truth, Allen said, was that the only people who had the equipment to stop the oil spill were the companies that pull the oil out of the ground in the first place.
[TPM SLIDESHOW: Fire In The Gulf: New Pictures Of The Deepwater Horizon]
Another trial Allen seemed to relish discussing was dealing with the media. Allen took some swipes at the press, which criticized him and the recovery throughout the crisis — often for constantly changing plans and for blocking access (by shutting down airspace and keeping boats away from the spill).
“The press interpreted that as we didn’t want them to see oily birds,” he said.
The Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded and triggered the spill on April 20, sank two days later. That’s where Allen came in.
“The rig sunk on Earth Day,” Allen recalled. “The rig sunk while there were a number of NGOs in the White House meeting with the president celebrating Earth Day. Two hours later, I was in the Oval Office with the cabinet briefing the president on what had transpired and what was going forward.”
Allen said suggestions that President Obama and his team didn’t understand the depth of what they were dealing with in the Gulf were unfounded.
“Let me make it abundantly clear to everybody: there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that we were dealing with a catastrophic event from the start,” Allen said, recalling the Earth Day White House meeting.
Allen seemed to still be defensive about critics who claimed throughout the crisis that the government didn’t know what it was dealing with down in the Gulf.
“Nobody was low-balling any estimates,” he said of that first meeting on the crisis. “Everybody knew this was serious.”
“Ultimately,” Allen said, the sheer size of what the spill would become “dwarfed” the response plan “BP had created,” but he said a plan to deal with a catastrophe was in place from the start.
The big issue, Allen said, was the required seat at the table given to BP. As the legally designated “responsible party,” the oil giant — along with the rig company TransOcean — was required to pay for the cleanup with the help of federally-approved private contractors. It’s not like other events where a federal disaster declaration means “the money will flow” to local governments, Allen said.
Right off the bat, Allen said, the unique legal framework caused problems.
“Nobody could understand that a responsible party deemed to be responsible for the event could somehow be consequential to the response itself,” Allen said. “That created a cognitive dissonance among the public and our political leaders.”
I asked Allen after the event what lessons he would offer the nation’s political leaders when it comes to handling the next BP-style crisis. It’s the politicians, after all, who exert the most pressure on bureaucrats to produce the kind of results they need to survive — and who often take the biggest hit when those results can’t be delivered.
Allen said the best thing to do is get the political instincts out of the equation entirely.
“It’s not my position to counsel political leaders on how to talk,” he said.
Note: This post has been updated.
