Buttressing Floridians' complaints about Washington's response to the giant BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a federal commission blasted the Obama administration for initially underestimating the scope of the disaster, and then overreacting politically.
In four "working papers," the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling said confusion about the spill rate hampered federal response to the April 20 blowout.
The commission -- co-chaired by former Florida Gov. and Sen. Bob Graham and ex-EPA administrator William Reilly -- accused the White House's Office of Management and Budget of delaying a report by government scientists that would have included a "worst-case" estimate of the rate of the spill, weeks before the government revised its own official estimates upward, according to the Washington Post.
State Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, called the commission's assessment "a stinging indictment of the administration's mishandling of this disaster."
Gaetz, whose Panhandle district spans 170 miles of Gulf coastline, told Sunshine State News that the federal response was "totally mismanaged."
Commission investigators faulted the administration for giving too much credence to initial estimates that just 1,000 barrels of oil a day were flowing from the ruptured BP well.
The actual figure at the time was closer to 60,000 barrels per day, rising to 100,000 a day.
Once engaged, the federal response became politicized and haphazard, the commission alleged.
In late May, a month after the blowout began, President Obama announced he would triple the federal manpower -- even as officials on the scene said they had sufficient resources. The commission report declared:
"Tripling, or at least the arguable overreaction to the public perception of a slow response, resulted in resources being thrown at the spill in general rather than being targeted in an efficient way."
As Florida and other Gulf states jockeyed for resources, the commission staff said "boom wars" ensued.
"Boom was eventually distributed according to political imperatives," the staffers concluded.
Florida officials had complained that the federal response team was slow to bring oil-vacuuming vessels into the fight, and that the administration seemed vaguely disengaged to Panhandle concerns.
"Information we received now turns out to be inaccurate, as we suspected right along," Gaetz recalled.
One of the working papers said a "lack of regulatory guidance" muddied the role and responsibility of the national incident commander, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen.
"For the first 10 days of the spill, it appears that a sense of over-optimism affected responders. Responders almost uniformly noted that, while they understood that they were facing a major spill, they believed that BP would get the well under control," the paper stated.
Gaetz, who weathered five hurricanes as superintendent of Okaloosa County schools, said the federal response to the oil spill was "thinly veiled chaos."
"It was extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to get the simplest decision made by the Unified Command at the time we were preparing for the worst. This was a group of people and agencies that had a helluva a hard time deciding what kind of cookies they would have at their next meeting," he said.
And the dysfunction continued as the report disputed the contention of Carol Browner, of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, that most of the oil spill was "gone" by early August.
Administration officials defended their actions, stating, "The federal government response was full force and immediate, and the response focused on state and local plans and evolved when needed."
They said they would not have acted differently, even if they had known the spill rate was multiples higher.
Jim Zabcik, a Texas-based petroleum engineer, called the flow rate debate "a red herring."
"What difference does it make knowing the amount of oil that was leaking? It's like finding out how fast two cars were traveling before a head-on collision," Zabcik told Sunshine State News from his office at Merlon International in Houston.
"I do understand how there could be much confusion about the actual flow rate.There are no measuring devices in place.It's a guessing game.BP was focused on capping the well."
The administration's own report, issued in August, varied with many of the latest findings. The commission disputed the administration's analyses, saying they had not been peer-reviewed by independent scientists.
Looking ahead, Gaetz said his Senate Select Committee on the Economy will recommend that Florida take the lead in establishing a multi-state Gulf Coast compact to deal with such emergencies.
"We've learned from Deepwater Horizon that we cannot count on the federal government to get its act together. Waiting naively for Washington cannot be Florida's policy," he said.
--
Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
