Winston Groom (a great historian and great former journalist who
is best known as the author of Forrest Gump) has an absolutely
essential
piece in today’s Weekly Standard about the stunningly
utrageous level of bureaucratic interference in efforts to
contain the Gulf oil spill. We at the Washington Times today add
other important details. For example,
Radio Netherlands, for example, reported on May 4 that the
Environmental Protection Agency’s water discharge rules appear
to have played a role in prompting federal agencies to turn
down international offers of assistance, including oil skimming
equipment from the Netherlands. The massive Dutch ships are
specifically designed to deal with oil spills by taking in the
contaminated seawater, separating out a large amount of oil and
then dumping the remaining water overboard. “But the water does
contain some oil residue, and that is too much according to
U.S. environment regulations,” Radio Netherlands explained.
These ships sat idle for six weeks because bureaucratic rules
could not distinguish an effort that would have sucked 5,000
tons of oil per day out of the Gulf from the actions of someone
deliberately pumping oil into the water.
From Groom’s piece comes this info:
Each morning seems to bring a new fool’s errand. On June 18,
for example, the U.S. Coast Guard apprehended a dozen
oil-skimming barges in the midst of performing their duty, and
shut down their operations for the rest of the day in order to
determine if they were carrying the proper number of life
preservers and fire extinguishers. If the Coast Guard was so
worried about safety, why not simply take a big pile of life
preservers and fire extinguishers out to these craft and hand
them around, so that the skimmers could keep at their essential
job? But that is not the way government operates. At least not
this government, which has created a perfect storm of
bureaucratic and regulatory gridlock around the Deep-water
Horizon disaster. Whatever is done to prevent the oil from
coming ashore must be approved by the EPA, OSHA, the Army Corps
of Engineers, the Coast Guard, and a host of lesser
bureaucracies. Just a few days ago, a large slick of oil
several hundred acres in size was allowed to enter Mobile Bay
and hover in the lee of Gaillard Island, one of the largest
Brown Pelican rookeries in the United States. According to a
spokesman for BP, “None of the 135 boats working out of Dog
River, or the 54 boats working out of Fairhope, had the
training to handle the oil.” It seems oil skimming or booming
requires taking courses and passing tests given by the federal
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. -Otherwise you
run the risk of being arrested. Same goes for trying to save
oiled birds or other wildlife. Federal permits—which can take
up to three years to process—are required, and violators are
subject to arrest, fines, and jail.
This isn’t a partisan hit on the Obamites. I bow to no one in
my
anger at the Bush administration for how
it mishandled Katrina both short-term and long. But in the
case of the Bush administration, local and state officials (with
the exceptions of then-Rep. Bobby Jindal in Louisiana and Gov.
Bob Riley in Alabama) were incompetents who made the Bush
administration’s job much harder by getting in the
administration’s way, while the administration did at least, via
the Coast Guard and Fish and Wildlife Service, rescue about
35,000 people. In this case of the oil spill, all the state and
local officials (again with now-Gov. Jindal and Gov. Riley
leading the way) have performed absolutely admirably, but the
Obama administration is getting in their way (rather than
vice-versa) and the new Obamatized Coast Guard being as much a
font of harmful red tape as it is much of a help to anyone. In
short, bad as the Bush response to Katrina has been, Obama’s
response to the oil spill has been far, far worse — to the
degree where it is, in moral terms, almost criminally negligent.
This disaster was all BP’s fault, and in the long run BP should
pay and pay and pay and pay and pay for its numerous violations
of basic safety and response rules and practices. But the EFFECT
of the disaster on the coasts and in the wetlands, and in the
whole Gulf eco-system, could have been so greatly lessened if the
administration were competent and caring that the blame for
long-term damage must read in the Oval Office, in the person of
that cold, detached Alinskyite who sees in this spill nothing
more than yet another opportunity to stop other offshore drilling
and push cap and trade. The word for his response, in every sense
of the word, is “rotten.”
