As oil edged toward the Louisiana coast and fears continued to grow that the leak from a seabed oil well could spiral out of control, officials in the Obama administration publicly chastised BP America for its handling of the spreading oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, where Obama is expected to travel this weekend.
Yet a review of the response suggests it may be too simplistic to place all the blame for the unfolding environmental catastrophe on the oil company. The federal government also had opportunities to move more quickly, but did not do so while it waited for a resolution to the spreading spill from BP.
The Department of Homeland Security waited until Thursday to declare that the incident was “a spill of national significance,” and then set up a second command center in Mobile, Ala. The actions came only after the estimate of the size of the spill was increased fivefold to 5,000 barrels a day.
Some are calling this “Obama’s Katrina”.
He waited EIGHT days while he attacked Goldman-Sachs and Arizona.
Now he has ordered ALL drilling ceased until an investigation is conducted. Which means a rise in the prices at the pumps.
Glad to see SOME outrage coming out on this.
Jim Elliott
Florida.
Don’t worry. He’ll blame BP and the eeeeeeeeevvvvvvvviiiiiillll Big Oil and skate because the media will cover for him.
Until we know what happened, how can you, I, or Barak Obama blame anyone? Is there something the President of the United States have been doing in the past eight days to get that blowout valve turned off that wasn’t being done, No.1?
#3, the talk about this is obviously generated by the over-the-top criticism of Bush when the hurricane came into the Gulf Coast, despite the fact that many of the largest mistakes were made in Louisiana, not in Washington.
However the feds do seem to have been asleep at the switch to some extent here. This may, as it did with Katrina, have little to do with who’s in the White House and more to do with the enormous inertia of the federal bureaucracy no matter who’s at the top.
Thanks for posting it. I hope that the involved company will do their best to clear out the water. It brings hazard not only to the fishes and environment but also to the people around the area. Anyway, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico 2010 hasn’t been a downfall for everyone. Actually, [url=http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2010/05/05/wind-power-companies/]wind power[/url] advocates are finally getting the attention they deserve due to this misfortune. America has some wind farms through the region, but they are small in quantities. It appears as though the harder somebody works for a wind farm; the harder more people push back from a wind farm. With the BP oil spill increasing gas prices, it’s also raising wind power stock prices. The two seem to go hand in hand. I think that we will finally start for making a dent on our environment.