How inept has the Obama administration been in responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher? Reports from the field suggest that, nearly 70 days into the crisis, the federal response to the oil clean-up is still in disarray. For evidence, we Virginians need look no farther than the port of Norfolk, where the world’s largest oil skimmer, the “A Whale,” is berthed and waiting for federal authority to proceed to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Taiwanese-owned, South Korean-built supertanker has 12, 16-foot intake vents designed to skim the oil off the water’s surface. As the Daily Press quotes its owner, Nobu Su, the ship would float across the Gulf “like a lawn mower cutting the grass,” ingesting up to 500,000 barrels of oil-contaminated water a day.
What’s the hold-up? The big problem appears to be the lack of formal government approval, presumably from the Coast Guard, allowing it to assist in the clean-up. Also complicating matters are the lack of a contract with BP to perform the work (although I’m not sure why that’s an issue if the A Whale is willing to pitch in without a contract), and possible Jones Act restrictions against the operation of foreign-manned vessels in American waters.
News of the A Whale follows revelations that the Obama administration spurned assistance from the Dutch government to dispatch its own oil-skimming vessels and to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers. According to Canada’s Financial Post, “One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks.” The U.S. response: “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Unlike the Katrina disaster, where state and local governments resisted Bush administration intervention in the hurricane response, there is no question whatsoever that the federal government is in charge of the clean-up of U.S. territorial waters. It’s bad enough that the Feds were so ill prepared to deal with the disaster — we can forgive them, perhaps, for failing to imagine such a collossal oil spill — but there is no excuse for the inept, bureaucratic response once the magnitude of the disaster became apparent. Seventy days into the event, the pettifogging legalisms continue to hamstring the the clean-up.
While Obama played golf and the bureaucrats picked their bureaucratic nits, massive quantities of oil, which could have been skimmed or blocked by sand berms, began befouling the marshes and beaches of the Gulf Coast.
