By Richard A. Joyce

Redstone Review

PUEBLO – The magnitude of the oil-spill disaster currently unfolding along the eastern U.S. Gulf Coast is quite literally beyond calculation.

Life for the people of that region has been changed, if not forever, then for the foreseeable future. Loss of wildlife, loss of jobs, loss of boats, businesses and hope have mounted steadily with every barrel of oil that surges from beneath the ocean floor into the water currents of the Gulf.

British Petroleum, owner of the well, Halliburton, responsible for cementing operations that would seal the well until the oil and gas from it were needed, and Transocean, owner of the floating platform rig drilling the well, all sent representatives to Congress to point fingers at each other regarding whose error led to the catastrophe on the rig.

Several days later, BP publicly accepted responsibility for the whole disaster and began, in coordination with the U.S. Coast Guard, trying to find ways to stop the oil gushing from the well into the Gulf and to burn and collect the oil and prevent it from reaching shore.

As BP’s ideas for stopping the oil flow failed, one after another, with weeks going by between attempts, and as it became obvious that the amount of oil rushingupward into the gulf far exceeded BP and U.S. government official estimates, it also became painfully evident that it would reach the shore, killing wildlife, shutting down fishing operations and keeping tourists and their millions of dollars far away from Gulf coast beaches from Louisiana to Florida.

In the middle of it all stands President Obama, condemned by some for being too presidential and unemotional in his response, by others for not taking charge of BP’s response and forcing the oil giant to seal the well and clean up the spill. Taking fire with Obama is Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who oversees the U.S. Mineral Management Service, which has been accused of contributing to the disaster by maintaining a cozy relationship with big oil companies and therefore letting them skirt regulations in their offshore drilling operations.

Specifically, some critics accuse Obama and Salazar of not investigating that agency and making it do the job it is charged with doing: regulating the offshore drilling industry properly. Indeed, according to an article by Corbin Hair published in May on its website by The New Republic, “We now know that there were glaring deficiencies in the way MMS was regulating the offshore-drilling industry—from lax safety requirements to missing blowout preventers.”

Blair said recently disclosed documents show that MMS waived an environmental review of BP’s plan for the Deep Water Horizon operation. In fact, Blair points out, since the Deepwater Horizon destruction, MMS has OK’d 27 offshore drilling plans, exempting all but one from a comprehensive environmental evaluation. Clearly, the responsibility for those failures to perform falls on the Obama administration for two reasons.

First, Obama removed the Interior Department’s inspector general, Earl Devaney, who under George Bush ferreted out that cozy MMS-oil company relationship. Devaney was reassigned in February 2009 to track stimulus payouts.

Second, Obama failed to nominate someone to replace Devaney; his deputy, Mary Kendall, just didn’t inherit the clout Devaney had because of the word “acting” in front of her inspector general title.

A permanent inspector general tasked with making sure oil drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico were tightly regulated might have prevented the current situation.

Perhaps even more alarming, however, is what the agency did do during the Bush administration that no one heeded.

McClatchy Newspapers reporter Shashank Bengali filed this on June 8: “Washington – A decade ago, U.S. government regulators warned that a major deepwater oil spill could start with a fire on a drilling rig, prove hard to stop and cause extensive damage to fish eggs and wetlands because there were few good ways to capture oil underwater. The disaster scenario — contained in a May 2000 offshore drilling plan for the Shell oil company that McClatchy has obtained — author … was the … Minerals Management Service.”

After 9/11 and the Bush executive order of May 18, 2001 that “pushed his new administration to speed up the search for oil,” the article said, that warning faded into the background. Then, in 2004, according to information on the website Jones Act Injury Attorneys, the MMS did a series of tests on the viability of blow-out preventers at the “highest water depths that they are rated to be able to function. The studies ultimately demonstrated that only three of 14 BOPs were successful in severing the pipe and cutting off the flow.”

So, even when the MMS did discover and report potentially serious problems with the technology and the worst case scenarios that might occur, no one listened, no one took action – not under Bush, not under Obama. Why?

In today’s world, energy is money, and energy is power. We, the energy consumers, demand more of it each day, not only here, but around the world. Oil is still in high demand, and so securing as much of it as possible as far into the future as possible keeps us secure, keeps our vehicles running, makes many people wealthy, provides jobs for tens of thousands.

No one in the oil industry wants to slow all that that down by waiting for exhaustive studies to show compliance with government regulations, or to prove that a disaster can be controlled to the extent it won’t damage the environment. And most of us outside the oil industry don’t want to curb our lifestyles by cutting back seriously on our use of products made from oil. Of course, we certainly don’t want to have such oil disasters, either. Even now, as Obama and Salazar backpedal with a moratorium on offshore drilling in an attempt to check on all the permits granted, they are being criticized for putting at least hundreds of wells on hold and thousands of oil workers in limbo. It’s an enormous Catch-22 for everyone, and no one person can be blamed for all of it. The Deep Water Horizon issued this nation an enormous wakeup call as it slipped beneath the waters of the gulf. We all share the responsibility for heeding it.

Richard A. Joyce is an associate professor in the mass communications department at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He is an award-winning journalist who served as managing editor, and subsequently editor and general manager of the Cañon City Daily Record during the years 1988-1994. The opinions he expresses in this column are strictly his own, and do not represent in any way the views of anyone else at the Redstone Review or at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He can be reached at phase15@mac.com.

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