oil leak showed more signs of strain Sunday as members of the Obama
administration bashed BP’s progress even as they acknowledged they have
to rely on the oil giant’s equipment and expertise to plug its
blown-out well.
In one of the harshest government condemnations of the petroleum giant to date, Interior Secretary
“I am angry and I am frustrated that BP has been
unable to stop this oil from leaking and to stop the pollution from
spreading,” Salazar said at a
The federal government could resort to taking over
tasks now controlled by BP, Salazar suggested. “If we find they’re not
doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way
appropriately,” he said.
U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm.
Unlike previous news conferences, in which federal
officials referred to the oil giant as “our partner,” Landry referred
Sunday to BP as “the responsible party.”
“I did have to apply pressure to BP over the last few days,” she said in an afternoon news conference in
“There was a lot of equipment there that wasn’t being deployed
appropriately or quickly enough for my satisfaction. So we put our foot
down with that.”
Those comments stood in contrast to morning news show remarks from Landry’s superior, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Adm.
“When I give them direction or the federal on-scene coordinator gives them a direction, we get a response,” he told host
Asked if BP was “in charge” of the effort to stop
the leak, Allen said, “I don’t think it’s an issue of control.” But he
acknowledged that “access to the discharge site is controlled by the
technology that was used for the drilling, which is owned by the
private sector. They have the eyes and ears that are down there. They
are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved. Our
responsibility is to conduct proper oversight to make sure they do
that.”
“All of us at BP are trying to solve the problem,” he said.
The mixed tone from federal officials came amid
growing frustration over failed efforts to contain the month-old leak,
which has spewed an estimated 7 million gallons of oil into the Gulf,
and possibly much more.
BP plans to try to plug the leak as early as Tuesday
by jamming it with mud, an operation they call a “top kill.” If the top
kill and subsequent short-term plans on deck fail, the oil could
continue leaking until August, when the company hopes to complete a
relief well.
After a boat tour of the Gulf Sunday,
own measures to block encroaching oil by erecting sand barriers and
other devices in front of the fragile inland marshes.
He criticized the US Army Corps of Engineers for
failing to render a faster approval of a state plan to dredge and build
barrier islands far offshore to keep the oil out of the marshes.
“Every day we are not given the authorization to
move forward and create more of these sand booms is another day where
that choice is made for us and more and more miles of our shore are hit
by oil,” Jindal said.
A corps spokesman said the agency is proceeding with
the governor’s request under emergency rules, but still had to comply
with a federal environmental-impact law that requires advice from other
agencies.
Jindal also said that requested boats, skimmers and
barges were in short supply, and that he discovered crews ready to work
who were facing bureaucratic hurdles to laying more boom.
“It’s clear the resources needed to protect our coast are not here,” he said.
The Republican governor’s response was one of a
number of indications that the outrage over the growing disaster may
prove as tricky to contain for the Obama team as the oil itself.
From the left this week, Democratic operative
the Kentucky Republican Senate candidate, called out the
administration’s aggressive anti-BP language, particularly Salazar’s
“boot heel” comments.
“I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business,” Paul said.
Since the
explosion that killed 11 workers and eventually sank the Deepwater
Horizon rig, BP and the government had mostly presented a public image
of cooperation and comity, holding joint news conferences and billing
their effort as a “Unified Command.”
The good vibes appeared to fray last week as large
amounts of oil washed ashore, and as the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency ordered BP to stop using the dispersant it was spraying to break
up the oil, an order BP refused.
On
say…that the government has stood around, done nothing and hoped for
the best,” he said. “We were activated the moment that this oil rig
exploded.”
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