On April 29th, Ron Gouget, who once managed Gulf spill response teams, publicly pilloried the administration’s response to the tragic oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Gouget is an expert when it comes to these matters: he helped create the 1994 plan that allowed expedited burning of oil as soon as a major spill had occurred — without having to wait for permission or approvals….”They had pre-approval. The whole reason the plan was created was so we could pull the trigger right away instead of waiting ten days to get permission,” Gouget said. “If you read the pre-approval plan, it speaks about Grand Isle, where the spill is. When the wind is blowing offshore out of the north, you have preapproval to burn in that region. If the wind is coming onshore, like it is now, you can’t burn at Grand Isle. They waited to do the test burn until the wind started coming onshore.”
Asked why officials waited for a week before conducting even a test burn, Gouget said, “Good question. Maybe complacency was the biggest issue. They probably didn’t have the materials on hand to conduct the burn, which is unconscionable.”
He said the NOAA officials involved at the Unified Command Center in Louisiana know how to respond to spills, and know burning should have started as soon as possible after the initial release was detected. Gouget said they may have been overruled… “This whole thing has been a daily strip tease. At first they thought it was just the diesel, then they said the well wasn’t leaking. It’s unfortunate they didn’t get the burning going right away. They could have gotten 90 percent of the oil before it spread.”
And where is the MSM?
They would be hanging Bush in effigy if this had happened during his Administration but nope….Obama’s in and instead they give air time to him as he blames BP before all the facts are in….cough Cambridge cough…
The president vowed that the administration, while doing all it could to mitigate the environmental and economic disaster, would require well-owner BP America to bear all costs.”BP is responsible for this leak. BP will be paying the bill,” Obama, with rain dripping from his face, said in Venice, a Gulf Coast community serving as a staging area for the response.
Believe me….he doesn’t know this. No one does yet and its quite possible this will be in the court system for years. Obama’s words will come back to bite him in the end, as it did during Cambridge.
But he needs a bad guy so people won’t ask the questions that should be asked.
Why did it take so long to respond to this?
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