Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Oh, for God's sake, this bloody plan has been around for years

and the feds never bothered to buy any of the damn things?
If U.S. officials had followed up on a 1994 response plan for a major Gulf oil spill, it is possible that the spill could have been kept under control and far from land.

The problem: The federal government did not have a single fire boom on hand.

The “In-Situ Burn” plan produced by federal agencies in 1994 calls for responding to a major oil spill in the Gulf with the immediate use of fire booms.

But in order to conduct a successful test burn eight days after the Deepwater Horizon well began releasing massive amounts of oil into the Gulf, officials had to purchase one from a company in Illinois.

When federal officials called, Elastec/American Marine, shipped the only boom it had in stock, Jeff Bohleber, chief financial officer for Elastec, said today.

At federal officials’ behest, the company began calling customers in other countries and asking if the U.S. government could borrow their fire booms for a few days, he said.

A single fire boom being towed by two boats can burn up to 1,800 barrels of oil an hour, Bohleber said. That translates to 75,000 gallons an hour, raising the possibility that the spill could have been contained at the accident scene 100 miles from shore.

“They said this was the tool of last resort. No, this is absolutely the asset of first use. Get in there and start burning oil before the spill gets out of hand,” Bohleber said. “If they had six or seven of these systems in place when this happened and got out there and started burning, it would have significantly lessened the amount of oil that got loose.”

But we're supposed to trust all these bureaucrats and politicians to take care of us?

3 comments:

Windy Wilson said...

Further, we're supposed to believe that these bureaucrats and politicans conspired to bring down the three WTC buildings, hit the Pentagon, crash a jet AND dispose of all those people without any one of hundreds of co-conspirators messing up or blabbing?

skidmark said...

How many school/mall shootings did it take before the SOP was revised to go in immediately and take on the active shooter, as opposed to waiting for SWAT to arrive, assemble and shuffle into place? Are we to expect that there will need to be several more oil spills before they start attacking the stuff as it rises to the surface instead of waiting for it to spread?

Gad! The brainpower amassed to deal with this situation would not fill a thimble!

stay safe.

markm said...

They'll find a way to blame Bush - for not buying it in '94!