Gulf Oil-Spill Clean-Up: Facts and Myths

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/14/110314fa_fact_khatchadourian

Article is for subscribers only, but I read it yesterday in the print edition. Great article and everyone should read, it dispelled a lot of misconceptions about the clean up and made a lot of other theories look foolish (myself included)

Some points I learned:

*The cleanup itself was remarkable logistical effort, basically unprecedented on this type of scale in this type of time frame and considered a huge success in this area.

*BP was really good about devoting any and all resources to the containment cleanup and essentially writing a blank check.

*Louisiana officials were complete idiots, including Governor Bobby "Great Wall" of Jindal - which did nothing but cost tons of money and make the problem worse, but the real moron was Plaquemines Parish President Nungesser, who comes off as a grandstanding fool who did more harm than good and basically diverted resources to their own counterproductive ends.

*One good example is that everybody wanted a zillion miles of containment boom to surround their own little islands - idiotic because it made far more sense to deploy the booms further out. where it could trap the oil prior to it making it inland, using less boom.


*These morons basically learned to manipulate the media with pictures of dead birds (some of which may have been from previously existing spills/pipeline ruptures), CNN and MSNBC and Fox etc were easy marks.

*Most of the silly ideas about super-skimmers, blowing up the well, and Kevin Costner ideas that were trumpeted in the press were the rantings of idiots that would have not really worked or been feasible

*The EPA also got maniupulated and came off as over-cautious and an obstacle to the clean-up

*The fact that the spill was so deep seems (currently, we don't know for sure) like a net positive, as far as ecological damage goes, because there is very little life down there and a lot more space for it to disperse.

 

Believe it or not, apparently somebody did try this once (in England after one of the first major oil-spills of the century when basically they had no clue what to do) - surprisingly it didn't work.

 

Thank you for bringing it up - if you contrast Bush's response with Obama's response you can tell a lot was learned between the two situations (and see a lot more active response - which wasn't always a good thing).

Rather than sitting back in his office and blackberrying "Heckuva job Brownie", and then washing his hands of it - Obama was on the ground with the Coast Guard on his left and idiots like Nungesser on his right trying to resolve impasses.

One can say this was actually coutnerproductive because, while it did shut up Nungesser et al for brief periods, Obama should have probably just told Nungesser and Jindal to go f-ck themselves in the end rather than letting them build sandcastles out in the gulf.

 

I linked to this in another thread, but FWIW, the article is no longer subscriber only and a really good read if you're interested:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/14/110314fa_fact_khatchadourian