Efforts to Repel Gulf Oil Spill Are Described as Chaotic

[thewiseguy]

New York times is running an article criticizing the Feds response to the gulf oil spill, their lack of coordination, and rapid response. I am going to post a few excerpts from the article here...

From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.

“The present system is not working,” Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said Thursday at a hearing in Washington devoted to assessing the spill and the response. Oil had just entered Florida waters, Senator Nelson said, adding that no one was notified at either the state or local level, a failure of communication that echoed Mr. Bonano’s story and countless others along the Gulf Coast.

“The information is not flowing,” Senator Nelson said. “The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control.”

Leslie Pearson, a private oil-spill response consultant, said federal oversight of spill contingency plans largely amounts to accepting what oil industry operators say they can do, rather than demanding they demonstrate that they can actually do it.

“Their plans don’t say, ‘Within X amount of time it has to be controlled and industry needs to prove how the heck you’re going to do that,’ ” she said.

The BP plans do consider an uncontrolled blowout, one that releases 240,000 barrels a day into the gulf for at least 100 days — far worse than the current spill.

In the event of such an enormous spill, according to these plans, “no significant adverse impacts are expected” to beaches, wetlands or coast-dwelling birds.

On the beach at Port Fourchon, Mr. Travirca said, cleanup workers left oil-soaked mops on the beach for days, where the tides buried them in the sand. The workers were finally told to pick up the mops and put them in garbage bags, which they did — but not before shaking the mops out and strewing the beach with oil again.

The cleanup operation has also been, at times, a casualty of politics. One staffing agency sent more than 150 trained workers to the Gulf Coast only to be told that in light of local and state insistence on exclusively local employment, too many of the workers were from out of state. They were all let go the next day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/science/earth/15cleanup.html?pagewanted=1&hp

Where is the freaking leadership?

:wtf: