The Obama administration’s response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was characterized as slow and confused in a series of preliminary reports from a commission set up by President Obama to examine the disaster.
The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling — which was created in May, a month after the oil rig explosion — criticized various agencies for being slow to acknowledge the severity of the spill. One example cited was the administration sticking, for several weeks after the oil rig explosion, with its initial estimate that 5,000 barrels a day were being spilled, which turned out to be around 10 percent of the actual total.
The reports also take issue with an August declaration by Carol Browner, a White House adviser for energy and climate change, that “more than three quarters of the oil is gone”, a figure that the report says was significantly exaggerated.
According to the commission, the administration gave the impression that it was “either not fully competent” or “not fully candid with the American people about the scope of the problem.”
The result, according to the commission’s early findings, was a lack of public trust in the government in the days following the catastrophe, which killed 11 and dumped more oil into the Gulf of Mexico than any spill in American history.
A White House spokesman told The Washington Post that the administration gave a clear indication of how bad the spill might get, saying: “In early May, [Interior Secretary Ken Salazar] and Admiral Thad Allen told the American people that the worst-case scenario could be more than 100,000 barrels a day.”
However, as the Post points out, the estimates from Salazar and Allen dealt with a hypothetical, more catastrophic scenario that never actually happened.
More evidence of the confusion surrounding the explosion emerged Wednesday from testimony before a federal investigatory panel working on the BP spill. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that a worker tasked with monitoring the the rig’s safety failed to sound a general alarm despite indicator lights going off indicating the highest danger level.
The worker, Andrea Fleytas, said that she did not sound the general alarm because she was not trained to deal with such a large number of danger alerts at the same time.
BP is about to launch its new BPCares website. In a stunning move by BP last month, they decided to fight fire with their new BPCares website. The first task was to acquire all of the BPCares domains… mission accomplished!
The domains are as follows:
BPCares.com
BPCares.net
BPCares.org
BPCares.info
BPCares.us
BPCares.biz
Inside sources indicates that the BPCares website will attempt to point critics of BP that the goal moving forward is ‘Beyond Petroleum’, more to ‘Amoco’ for its future.
The new website will be launched soon.