Sure enough folks one of our own puts his head into the noose pumping Kevin Costner to make a point. How about we make one of our own beginning with Yobie Benjamin at the San Fransisco Chronical:
Like the rest of the nation, I am frustrated that the United States of America has not been able to muster the technology and resources to solve the gulf oil gusher disaster. The oil gusher is one thing we cannot solve because it requires technologies that the country has admitted it does not have.
The oil slicks are another matter. This is an old problem with known solutions.
It takes simple technologies combining booms, skimmers, vacuum and suction vessels, oil/water separators and boats and vessels in massive numbers to get the oil out of the water.
Perhaps contending with thousands of self promoting shills trying to make a quick buck has its drawbacks as we continue:
There have been persistent talk that the United States and the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command has been rejecting proven technologies and capabilities even from allies like the Dutch because of vagaries of laws and regulations. To me and countless others, this is not an acceptable answer. If something works, it should be deployed now.
Yep, the Obama administration has had its head firmly inserted up its ass on this turning down the Dutch. I mean hell, BP was smart enough to hire a dutch american guy in Ivor Van heerden, surely they were smart enough to accept the dutch offers? Not exactly as Slabbed was on this last week as I left a link in a comment on this general subject and it is with Loren Steffey with the Houston Chronical we stop in with next:
Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.
It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.
The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.
Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.
U.S. ships are being outfitted this week with four pairs of the skimming booms airlifted from the Netherlands and should be deployed within days. Each pair can process 5 million gallons of water a day, removing 20,000 tons of oil and sludge.
At that rate, how much more oil could have been removed from the Gulf during the past month?
The uncoordinated response to an offer of assistance has become characteristic of this disaster’s response. Too often, BP and the government don’t seem to know what the other is doing, and the response has seemed too slow and too confused.
Confused doesn’t begin to describe it but I think it is clear available technology can handle the cleanup without need for a new master inventions (or even old ones promoted by washed up move actors). I can’t begin to imagine what it is like to have thousands of people, most of them with a profit motive in their heart, banging on the door with the next great solution only then to cry to the media after BP passes them by. The distraction must be monumental. Enter Dave Vincent with WLOX who evidently thinks BP should drop everything they are doing to combat the spill and entertain would be inventors, existing technology be damned:
Here at WLOX we’ve had a number of individuals come forward with ideas they think may help in the clean up of the massive BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, British Petroleum, says it has received thousands of ideas from individuals on how to stop the leak and cleanup it up.
But here’s the problem, the folks we have talked with and many others we have seen on national television are frustrated because BP is not responding to their ideas. In fact, actor Kevin Costner, who invested millions of his own money in a device to cleanup oil, told a congressional committee this week there is just too much red tape.
Surely our American spirit of innovation can help come up with more effective tools than booms and dispersants. We need something like a 1940 Manhattan project where American scientists worked to produce a nuclear weapon. Gather the best brains in the country and let them come up with ways to capture this oil.
And surely Dave understands the oil is polluting our coast now and there is likely very little that can be done over the short term to roll out new technologies that will offer some sort of panacea to mitigate the spill’s impacts. Well, evidently not, but it is certainly easy to spend someone elses money.
Isn’t there enough news to put on the TeeVee without this fluff? Not in Soggy Bottom evidently.
sop
The way OPA-90 was “supposed” to work, and they way it DID work before “shills” like Obummer, David Axelrod, Rham Emmanuel and Valerie Jarrett turned OPA-90 on its head to promote political goals, including a complete BAN on offshore drilling (deepwater is only the first step), is as follows: For a “discharge” like this one , IMMEDIATE “federalization”, meaning that the Coast Guard, the DOI, MMS, NOAA, The National Pollution Funds Center, the National Response Center, and Indian Tribes, along with State and Local Government (where the heck has “The Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office” been since 4/20/10?) would be running the show and calling the shots. This is the epitome of “The Incident Command System”, with the key feature of “Unified Command”. The “wrongdoer”, ie. “the Responsible Party”, BP, would be relegated to mopping the floor and cleaning the toilets in the Unified Command Center, and to writing the checks that the Federal Incident Commander directed them to write, and when. Instead, Obummer and his Advisors appointed Thad Allen, who was to have retired in late May, as “Incident Commander”, but told him that he needed BP’s permission to wipe his ass, and thgat he couldn’t take a shit unless BP told him that it was OK for him to do so. BP also controlled the number of sheets of tissue he could use, if any. In other words, Obummer and his Advisors put BP in charge (and it is by no means clear that BP is not still in charge), which was akin to putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. This is NOT rocket science; it is “Management 101”, and for SOP “Accounting 101”. And don’t discount the Accounting Function, which is critical. It is my understanding that MEDIA are not allowed inside the Unified Command Center, and if they are, they are not permitted to take photographs. If they could, they would see a bevy of BP Accountants engaged in processing, approving and disapproving checks, and keeping a running tally of amounts spent on what, when. The Federal and State Governments should be doing this, not the wrongdoer. Also, we heard David Axelrod say on Meet the Press yesterday that “the claims function” is not “a core function” of an oil company. Well, oil spill response is not “a core function” of an oil company, either. However, oil spill response IS a core function of what are known as “OSRO’s” or “Oil Spill Response Organizations”, who should have been specifically identified in BP’s Oil Spill Response Plans for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Yet have ANY of the readers of SLABBED heard even one mention of the term OSRO since 4/20/10. I certainly haven’t, which causes me to ask, as I look at TV and read the newspaper and SLABBED every day, “What’s the plan, who’s in charge, who’s responsible for marshalling assets and personnel and deploying them in a strategic manner, or is this still a SNAFU operation almost 2 months after the blow-out?” The answer is, I respectfully submit, obvious, which is simply INEXCUSABLE. And the oil in the marsh and on the beaches is going to get WORSE before it gets any better.
Sop.
All roads lead back to Deano “da bozo” Bonano IMHO
If the Parish of Jefferson, the place where the first alarms should have sounded the loudest, had employed a qualified, credentialed individual instead of Bonano the response would have been better & faster. Bonano has no credibility with Jeff Parish employees. How the h!*# could anyone expect BP ; the Coast Guard or anyone else to listen to anything he said. Not to mention that instead of bringing in credentialed folks to run the operation Bonano just threatened to commandeer the BP boats.
Jefferson Parish is reaping the fruit planted by Mike Yenni Tim Coulon. Tim Whitmer Tom Wilkinson Aaron Broussard and all the other idjits who hired & promoted incompetant, unqualified people like Bonano
thank you all and cannot wait to watch you make the perp walk downtown!