Obama still faces hurdles in oil spill

July 13, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON

President Barack Obama and his team are tantalizingly close to their first major success in plugging BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after nearly three months of confounding setbacks.

Even if the capping plan that’s under way works, many struggles lie ahead, however.

BP still must kill the well, which could take weeks more. Cleaning up the spill has proved far trickier than envisioned. The administration’s long-term economic and environmental response will depend on the magnitude of the damage, which may take months or even years to emerge.

“We’re at a game-changing point,” National Incident Commander Thad Allen told McClatchy Newspapers on Monday. Still, Allen said, “Nobody should be happy that this happened. If there’s oil in the water, nobody should ever be happy with their response because all you’re doing is trying to make the best out of a bad situation.”

The spill has become one of the biggest challenges of Obama’s presidency, and how well the Gulf Coast states fare now and in the next few years could play a significant role in shaping the president’s legacy.

After underestimating for weeks how hard it would be for BP to stop the spill and how massive a federal response would be required, the administration has displayed a visibly more assertive role since mid-June in challenging and directing the oil company.

Behind the scenes, Allen said, that recognition came weeks earlier — in mid-to-late May — though still weeks after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon that killed 11 and marked the start of the spill.

“It became so geographically dispersed where you weren’t dealing with a single oil spill anymore, which started to defy the original planning parameters,” Allen said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that ultimately the scope of this thing and the complexity of this thing started to dwarf the response plans and the resources put against that plan and we had to adapt to it.”

Knowing that was one thing. Doing it took weeks.

Then suddenly last Friday, Allen, announced that BP would install a tight-fitting containment cap that the administration thinks can stop within days all oil from leaking into the Gulf until the well is killed.

Disaster response and environmental experts are divided over how harshly to critique the administration’s initial response.

More than 540 miles of coastline are oiled. About one-third of federal waters in the Gulf — 81,181 square miles — are closed to fishing.

As much as 80 percent of the oil that has spilled might still be in the water or along the coast, if the government’s high-range estimate of 60,000 barrels per day is accurate.

More than 46,000 people are involved in the response. BP has reported spending $3.5 billion already.

Nine million feet of boom, dozens of aircraft and more than 6,400 vessels have been deployed.

Despite the effort, more oil enters the Gulf each second. The Coast Guard describes it as a new spill every day.

“When the administration saw this was much worse than was envisioned, the first reaction shouldn’t have been ‘Let’s deliberate,’” said Daniel Kaniewski, a special assistant for homeland security under President George W. Bush and the co-author of an analysis of failures in the Hurricane Katrina response. “It should have been, ‘Let’s do this, and BP is paying for whatever it is we’re doing.’”