29 September 2010

WH Commission: Inept Team Obama Underestimated Oil Spill by 98.3%, Sabotaged Cleanup Efforts

"...Custer underestimating the number of Indians on the other side of the hill and paying a price for that"


 In a scathing critique of this administration's thoroughly-botched handling of the Gulf oil spill, the two co-chairs of a special White House commission said Team Obama underestimated the oil spill in spectacular fashion, with early estimates that were about 60 times too low, thereby crippling the federal -and BP's own- response:
The Obama administration lost the public trust and may have sabotaged clean-up operations in the Gulf of Mexico by grossly underestimating the amount of oil gushing from BP's broken Macondo well, according to a White House commission appointed to investigate the spill... 

Government agencies have come under sustained assault from independent scientists for initial estimates that put the size of the spill as low as 1,000 barrels a day – even as footage from the ocean floor showed a huge cloud of oil and gas billowing out of the BP well. 

A team of scientific experts assembled by the government eventually raised the estimate to more than 60,000 barrels a day. The low estimate may also have encouraged BP to take the ultimately unsuccessful step of attempting to cap the well with a giant dome. "

I think it did have an impact … on the issue of the containment technology," Graham said. The charges that government officials badly misjudged or misrepresented the gravity of the spill are extremely sensitive for the Obama administration, which claims repeatedly that its environmental policies are rooted in sound science.
More at The Guardian (UK)