We're conditioned, politically, to become indignant when government authorities fail to act quickly to save us from disaster and calamity. Where's the cavalry, we say. George W. Bush discovered this during Katrina, and now some pundits are skewering the Obama administration for being slow to respond to the Gulf disaster. Obama is heading there today to show he cares. The administration yesterday put Adm. Thad Allen in charge of the overall response, replacing Rear Adm. Mary Landry, who had had some deer-in-the-headlights moments on TV and had initially declared that there was no leakage at the bottom of the gulf.
But here's the disturbing fact of the matter: The government calvary can't do anything at the bottom of the sea.
Adm. Allen made that pretty clear in his news conference Saturday afternoon: The problem needs to be fixed at the source of the leak, 5,000 feet below the surface, and the military doesn't have the technology to do that. Only the oil industry can fix this problem. We're all at the mercy of BP and the engineers who understand deepwater drilling.
Ken Salazar said this morning that there are 30,000 wells in the Gulf, but how many are in deep water? This isn't continental shelf drilling -- this is cutting edge stuff, and as we learn more we'll probably discover that there are a lot of things that can go wrong when puncturing the planet at extreme depth.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/2010/05/deepwater_horizon_oil_spill.html
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