A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [132]
I say, “It had a bad effect on people’s perceptions—including mine—about whose side you were on.”
“Yeah, I understand that,” he says. “But I can tell you there was no untoward intent.”
And why such heavy reliance on booms anyway? I ask. They obviously weren’t up to the job.
“Oil was getting under and through the boom,” Allen acknowledges. “Boom is easily defeated.”
“So why—?”
Lubchenco begins, “The Oil Pollution Act directs NOAA to do research on cleanup, response, these kinds of things, and—”
“Budget casualties,” says Allen, beating her to the punch line. “We stopped doing research and development, so we never advanced beyond skimming and burning and dispersants.”
Lubchenco offers, “Every time they tried to put it in the budget; I wasn’t there then but I’m told—”
“I was budget director for the Coast Guard,” Allen asserts. “This stuff was defunded in the nineties and never got back into the budget. You can quote me on that.”
I know we’re pressed for time and I don’t want to keep you, I say, but that gets to the other peeve: such heavy reliance on dispersant chemicals.
“This is really important,” Allen explains. “Because the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 was Congress’s response to Exxon Valdez, legislators were producing regulations aimed at tanker spills. But drilling technology was going to deep water. We lost it on the technology.”
I comment that what people saw was the Coast Guard building a fire truck while the house was in flames.
“If you’re faced with building the fire truck,” Allen says, accepting the premise, “you can’t deploy a response system that doesn’t exist. You can’t spend time investigating what happened. You can’t get bogged down measuring what’s happening if your urgent goal is to stop it. You optimize what you’ve got. After you’re done, you analyze. We did get better over the weeks—. I don’t think the response was ever optimized. The availability of tools, the weather, how fast we could get ramped up—”
Allen explains that the Coast Guard’s role is to enforce and implement laws and regulations. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 laid out a spill response called the National Oil Spill Contingency Plan. That creates limitations, but he says it’s worked well—until now.
“This thing went off the scale,” he adds. Allen explains that the oil spill contingency plan had protocols allowing dispersants and surface burning, and when this blowout happened, events triggered the protocols. “But,” he says, “two things went off the scale: one was the total amount of oil; the other was that when the protocols were written, no one envisioned injecting dispersants at depths of five thousand feet.
“And we had what I call ‘the social and political nullification’ of the National Contingency Plan,” he says. In other words, the public and politicians weren’t buying the constraints of the law. Main case in point: “The National Contingency Plan says the spiller is the ‘responsible party.’ That means they have to be there with you. But having BP with us created cognitive dissonance with the public. People didn’t understand; how could BP be part of the command structure? But that was what the law required.”
He thinks it would be best to have a third party—not the oil company, not government—in charge of spill response. “Too much perception of conflicts of interest otherwise,” he says.
Another problem: “BP’s efforts to just keep writing checks to state and local governments—you can describe it any way you want—allowed those folks to act outside of federal coordination. Perfect example: the people of Plaquemines Parish decided they wanted to put boom out in Barataria Bay. That should have been coordinated with us. But they independently went out and did it. And to keep the boom in place, they hired a contractor who