A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [133]
“We were very insistent on preventing people from trying to clean marshes,” Lubchenco adds. “That just pushes the oil into the sediment, and then later it keeps coming up.” After the spill from the Amoco Cadiz, some oiled marshes were bulldozed; those are the areas that haven’t recovered. Marsh recovery seems to depend a lot on not disturbing the plants’ roots. With the Exxon Valdez, the mistake was to pressure-wash tidal zones with hot water. Hard clams are still diminished in washed areas because the structure of sediments was disrupted.
Following up on BP’s unusual eagerness to write checks—thinking again of Exxon—I ask for their thoughts on why BP agreed to fund a $20 billion account when no law required that.
“Early on,” Allen replies, “BP was saying yes to just about anything. It’s safe to say BP thought the situation was an existential threat to their corporation and their industry.”
“But—early on, too,” Lubchenco says turning to Allen, “BP wouldn’t let us get the video. That was a case where they had to be ordered to—”
“But even there,” Allen replies, “I don’t think they were trying to hide anything. Their position on live video was that with several remotely operated vehicles being very delicately maneuvered near each other, they didn’t want the operators under the added stress of being watched real-time.”
“That’s reasonable,” I say.
“It is reasonable,” Allen affirms. “But you know what? I said no. I said, ‘At this point—you lose that.’ I told them, ‘You’ve had a market failure and you’re responsible. So you lose discretion and things get dictated. That’s the way it is.’ ”
Allen adds that in dealing extensively with BP’s senior management, he sensed “no indication of any ulterior motives other than to re-establish their credibility, do what they had to do, and be responsible.”
Seeing my face turn skeptical, he continues: “Put it this way: there’s a difference between what seems like foot-dragging and obfuscation—and competence. BP is an oil company; they’re very good at getting oil out of the ground, but they absolutely suck at retail. One-on-one interactions with people—they don’t have a clue. You cannot hire consultants to give you compassion and empathy. A lot of things people got upset about and viewed as bad intent on BP’s part were, in my view, a lack of competency, capability, and capacity. But it produces inaction and people get the same perception.”
Speaking of inaction and perception, I ask how Coast Guard rear admiral Mary Landry could have said—after the whole rig sank, with eleven lives—that it was too early to call this a catastrophe and that no oil was leaking. Why didn’t they act immediately as if this obvious catastrophe would produce a worst-case blowout, and hope they were wrong?
Lubchenco insists that this is what they did. That the president said in his very first briefing, “I want everybody prepared for worst-case scenarios”; that within hours, her agency began generating models of currents, predicting where oil would be going. “Our folks mobilized anticipating the worst. Right from the beginning our efforts were incredibly intense.”
But how, I persist, could the Coast Guard have said immediately that it didn’t seem oil was leaking?
Allen replies that for two days after the rig sank, there was so much silt kicked up that the remote vehicles had a hard time seeing anything. “You’ve gotta remember, this is a place where there’s no human access. Everything has to be done remotely. It took almost seventy-two hours to understand what was going on. Initially there were leaks in three places where the pipe was kinked. It took a few days before the abrasive sand and everything coming out finally ground a larger