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Kent Garber
The blame game is in full force as some call for the government to take over for BP
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar had to excuse himself. He had been sitting in a hearing room on
"There are some critical decisions I want to make sure I'm watching," he said, before quickly heading out.
Salazar, like many others in the Obama administration, was scrambling to show that he was on top of the crisis, and it was critical (or so it seemed at the time). BP launched its "top kill" operation -- an ambitious and much-discussed attempt to plug the well that had been gushing oil by that point for more than a month. BP began injecting a muddy drilling fluid 5,000 feet down into the wellhead, hoping to create enough pressure to stem the release of oil and natural gas.
It was a recognized technique, but one never before attempted at such a depth. By the weekend, the plan had been abandoned as a failure.
It would be hard to overstate the disappointment, not just for BP, the world's No. 2 private-sector oil company after
President Obama took a stab at those questions.
"In case you're wondering who's responsible, I take responsibility," he said. "There shouldn't be any confusion here." But there is confusion, and though Obama tried to address it during his first press conference since last summer, it is clear that the
Part of the problem is visual.
Despite all the statements from BP and Obama cabinet members about what they are doing, what the public has seen, mainly, is the continued flow of oil. Largely unseen, for example, was the team of government scientists working under Nobel Prize-winning scientist and Energy Secretary Steven Chu at a command center in Houston, where they were advising on the top kill operation.
The
In the past few weeks, there have been calls, including some from Democrats, to push BP out of the way entirely. But the real problem, experts suggest, is not BP, but the environment in which BP is working. "All these things they are doing are fairly exceptional," says John Rogers Smith, a petroleum engineer and associate professor at
And as Jeffrey Short, one of the top scientists who investigated the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, noted last week, there is little room for error and therefore a need for caution. Previous efforts to plug the leak posed relatively little risk of worsening the spill, but that wasn't the case with the top kill effort. "This could actually backfire" rupturing the pipe and making the spill bigger, he said last week.
The question of responsibility continues to swirl around many other areas. Last week, a congressional memo offered some of the first details of what may have happened in the hours before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on
Fallout also has been felt at the
Responsibility for the accident, Obama has said, ultimately rests with BP, but the federal government is in charge of the response. "Those who think we were slow in our response or lacked urgency don't have the facts," he said. But he will have to work to change that perception. Even if someone can figure out how to cap the leak, there's still the massive problem of oil coating beaches and marshes, a problem many say the federal government has been slow to tackle.
Available at Amazon.com:
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Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
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BP Gulf Oil Spill: Anger Grows Over Spill as More Oil Comes Ashore