You may be right...hard to say... Seriously...this is not as "cut-n-dry" as you would like to make it sound. That is a serious undertaking with many possible consequences after the fact. You don't just rush into this sort of massive landscaping...
While studying the consequences, the delicate balance of nature is destroyed by the ever spreading oil spill. If it makes environmentalists happy, the gaps could be restored even faster than they could be filled. As far as "natural" nature, what a storm taketh away, a later storm could just as easily put back.
Thumbs...there is a LOT of coastline. Building barrier islands is a multi-month, maybe multiyear endeavor. More to the point, the reason the islands are reoding is because the mississippi river is neatly funneled out into the gulf - there is limited sediment to dredge, and in the process of removing it you may weaken barrier island resistance to future storms (or just natural wave action). If you setup the barrier islands wrong you can remove water circulation and kill off large swaths of wetalnd areas. It's not simple. That's all I'm saying.
I agree with your point that it is not simple. However, there are fewer miles of barrier island gaps than there is actual coastline. The gaps can be closed on a priority basis (they pretty much know where the currents are taking the oil). Protecting the wetlands and fish-breeding estuaries from the new thick oil spewing out is more crucial in the short term than protecting them from the long-term effects. As soon as the spill is capped and the clean-up under control, the gaps can be re-opened with explosives before that long-term damage can occur.
I'm trying to figure out what to make of this. From the Times: Obama Administration Supports Lifting Liability Cap for 'Future' Oil Spills By MIKE SORAGHAN of Greenwire The Obama administration maintains there should be no limit on oil companies' spill liability, but a top Justice Department official said it is not proposing to change the $75 million limit on BP PLC's Gulf of Mexico spill because the company has pledged to pay all legitimate claims. "We are focused on the future," Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, the department's No. 3 official, told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on the BP spill's 36th day. Still, Perrelli said, Congress would be on solid constitutional ground if it wanted to raise the liability caps retroactively on BP for economic damages. "Congress legislates retroactively all the time," he said. Perrelli said the administration is determined to make sure BP lives up to its commitment to pay for the damage it has caused. In the future, he said, the cap should be eliminated. "We don't think there should be an arbitrary cap on financial liability," Perrelli said. The nuanced position drew strong criticism from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "You may be one of the few people in the country who takes BP at its word," Sanders said. "A year from now, the television cameras will be gone, and it will be a fisherman who's trying to file a claim. And he's going to be by himself." http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/0...stration-supports-lifting-liability-2382.html
The cap on the liability was part of an agreement after Exxon Valdez. In return for the owners of the oil paying for all the clean up costs of a spill, and operating the clean up, the government agreed to cap the liability of damages from individuals/states at $75 million. This was to get agreement because as it stands, the leaseholder/owner of the oil is responsible for the clean up whether they caused the accident or not. Its an interesting trade off, because the oil companies now assume all clean up liability no matter what. If a tugboat rams an oil tanker on purpose, spilling a million barrels, whoever owns the oil has to pay to clean it up no matter what. The cap was a trade off in the original legislation for the agreement of all clean up liability. Now that there has been an actual spill, the legislators have forgotten that this was a trade off and want to take back that portion of the law. For this purpose, however, it is a moot point, as BP has already stated they will not abide by the cap, and in fact have blown past it. In fact, the $500 million set aside as a long term grant for environmental study is not required by any legal means that I know of, and is an example where BP has ignored the cap.
This is the truth right here. Once this well is capped this will only be a front page story a few times a week for a month or so and by three months it will only get a passing mention on the news cycle. Meanwhile, the oil and the damage will be there for years or decades to come.
The best thing BP can do, and I think they may be beginning the process, is to set up superfunds with the states themselves and let the states pay out the claims long term. In theory, if the fund is big enough, it can maintain the appropriate payments for a fairly long term.
The issue is can they go back and retroactively raise the cap, obviously this accident occured before any cap changes. Also, the republican push back is that the cap will hurt smaller producers, who for example couldn't afford the proposed $10BB cap
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Any producer that doesn't have the revenues to clean up problems that they could potentially create doesn't need to be in that line of business.
I'd have to agree with andy. Risk managers should be taking disasters and associated fiscal fallout into account before they greenlight the project. If it's beyond your experience and the potential cost of failure outweigh the benefits considering the risk level, don't take the job. This is an absolutely critical component of any major engineering project.
