From TPM Reader CW …
I live in Monterey, home of the Navy Post Graduate School and many national Oceanography centers and have been speaking with friends and neighbors in those centers.
There is a near concensus that there is too little sense of urgency. For example, a specialized submarine from MBARI is just now being readied to be dispatched to take water samples that might help determine the size of the underwater plume; why wasn’t that shipped within a week?
This is on the scale of a major earthquake, which would have prompted dramatic rescue, aid, troops being mobilized.
The inexplicably soft line on measuring the size of the spill, and the weak efforts of the EPA on dispersants, make one wonder who’s in charge. BP seems to be defying the law left and right. Where is the Attorney General? Things like BP and Coast Guard turning away reporters make one wonder if the administration is helping BP hide the consequences, when it should be shining a bright lens 24×7 on the severity of the situation and putting the entire Gulf Coast on preventive alert.
The administration prepared us well for the N1H1 flu virus; here the response to the disaster is nearly invisible.
Granted that there are no easy solutions to the problem. Sending a bunch of “out of the box scientists” to brainstorm, including one with racist views, didn’t seem serious. An open call to the best minds in the country about the Ocean, many of which are in this town, would make better sense.
The administration’s inability to comprehend the magnitude of the risk of other wells blowing up like this is also incomprehensible, approving further leases just as this disaster is unfolding. The proper response to this crisis is not only to stop the flow from the well, but to take away the lesson that oil production at this depth has catastrophic risks. Because most oil is produced elsewhere, its concomitant environmental damage is ignored by the Media and Americans, but talk to anybody near the oil fields in Nigeria or Ecuador and it’s clear that oil extraction carries a very heavy environmental price. But this lesson is not being learned as our own coasts are damaged, and the administration should be leading here, not following.
Having an official like Thad say “only BP can help us” confirms the powerlessness. In Kuwait, American troops capped and blew up wells.
The Navy has immense underwater demolition experience that should be appropriate; nobody understands the Ocean better, right? Right?
Again, the immensity of the disaster calls for Navy like responses. And if it is totally true that we are powerless, we should be heeding the warning that much more openly and clearly.
Perhaps Representative Farr’s Ocean committee should hold hearings?
