Panel criticizes low estimates of gulf oil spill

Says response was botched

September 28, 2010|Seth Borenstein, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s repeated low estimates of the BP oil spill undermined public confidence in the government’s entire cleanup effort, leaders of a White House-appointed commission declared at an investigatory hearing yesterday. One likened the mistakes to Custer’s disastrous decisions at Little Big Horn.

Federal officials botched the government’s response, a local official and government and university scientists contended as the commission focused on the questions of who was in charge and how much oil spewed out of the well into the Gulf of Mexico.

Eventually, US officials said the spill was about 60 times bigger than originally estimated. Instead of 42,000 gallons a day, the volume of leaking oil was closer to 2.4 million gallons a day.

“It’s a lot like Custer,’’ said panel cochairman Bob Graham, a former Florida senator and governor, referring to the battle that killed George Armstrong Custer and wiped out most of the Army’s 7th Calvary in 1876. “He underestimated the number of Indians on the other side of the hill and paid the ultimate price.’’

Regarding who was in charge, Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, one of the coastal areas most affected by the spill, referred to another famous leader, this one fictional.

“It became a joke,’’ Nungesser told the commission. “The Houma command was the Wizard of Oz, some guy behind the curtain.’’

Mistakes in the information that was being given out sapped confidence in the government on the issue, Graham and cochairman William Reilly said at a news conference. Reilly described “repeated wrong numbers’’ on the amount of oil that was spilling.

Retired admiral Thad Allen, in charge of the government’s response, told commissioners that the low estimates did not hamper government efforts to deal with the spill. But Reilly, former chief of the US Environmental Protection Agency, said he had trouble believing that.

Bill Lehr, a senior government scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that once his agency realized the spill was much larger than estimated, things changed tremendously. Vacations were canceled, retirees were called in, and oil-response staff was “given a blank check,’’ he said.

Florida State University’s Ian MacDonald said it took eight attempts by the government to arrive at the correct estimate. He said BP’s estimate of 210,000 gallons a day was about 100 times less than federal guidelines said it should have been, based on the thickness and color of the oil.

“Five thousand barrels a day [210,000 gallons] was not in the right ballpark, and I think we could have done better,’’ MacDonald said.