If you’re behind the curve on absorbing the offshore drilling lingo of the season, follow along.
After more than a month of failed attempts to keep millions of gallons of oil from gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, we’ve reached a day of high drama. If today’s attempt does not work, this hole may spew deep into the summer, surpassing the Exxon Valdez spill amount – if it hasn’t already.
The “top kill” method gets a shot today because nothing else has worked. The seal-off valves would not close. That steel containment contraption got clogged up. The tube plunged into the leak a mile beneath the surface is working, but that giant straw is not sucking nearly enough out of the oily Gulf and onto waiting ships.
So we watch a monstrous ooze eat animals and the livelihood of plenty of humans. Today’s plan from much-maligned BP is to pump super-dense muddy semi-fluids through tubes into the pipes to stop the flow.
If this works, we will start counting the cost of one of our worst ecological disasters. If not, the next plan is a Monty Python routine of shredded tires and golf balls poured on the source of the rupture in a fit of low-tech desperation.
Back on land, we see not so much a blame game as a blame avoidance game. In both the oil industry and government, the characters have donned “Not Me” uniforms like the little gremlin in the Family Circus cartoon, all calculated to avoid the dreaded stigma of ultimate fault.
Political finger-pointing will make the quest for proper accountability as murky as the coastal tides. A White House with distaste for both big business and domestic energy exploration is rubbing its hands at the good fortune of an event tailor-made to plant seeds of fear about offshore drilling. Critics of President Barack Obama are counting the days of unabated rupture and wondering when the administration might actually be held accountable for nonchalance.
There has been a smattering of criticism, even from some liberal TV pundits. But can you imagine the avalanche of derision that would have rained down on a Bush White House or some other Republican administration during such a crisis? An oil company, allowed to fiddle while the oil spews as a still Katrina-weary state braces for another disaster? We would have seen articles of impeachment by now.
There was much attention paid to the day when Obama actually seemed to grow angry at the failure to resolve the spill. It’s funny to see what gets an indignant rise out of this administration. Annoyance is not inappropriate here, but I’m waiting for some podium-pounding due to things like porous borders and insane spending. I guess I’ll have to wait for that, until at least 2013.
But meanwhile, amid cries of government sloth, I haven’t heard any specifics about what exact things government ought to do as this crisis worsens. It seems like it should be supervising the people who supposedly know what they’re doing.
But who are they? Once we get this underwater Bellagio fountain of crude strangled off, it will be time for lessons on how to prevent recurrences, if possible, and certainly how to respond better if there is a next time.
Some people wonder whether the Obama administration is intentionally sluggish in response so it can have a worse crisis to hold up as an example of the evils of drilling. I’ll stop short of that conclusion for now, but the coming weeks may contain a different kind of rupture – the gush of evidence that drilling companies, the federal government or both could have handled this whole thing much better.
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