An e-mailer who’s an expert on oil spills weighs in on that Wall Street Journal story the other day on the chaos of the response:

-The criticism about not having adequate ocean boom is probably valid. It costs a lot, and is practically never used, so there isn’t a lot in inventory – anywhere in the world. But it is irrelevant for this spill (see the next point). -Booms and dispersants are not compatible with each other. Booms only work when the oil floats on the surface of the water. Yet the whole purpose of dispersants is to get the oil to disperse down into the water column, breaking the oil into tiny droplets that have vastly increased surface area, so that natural degradation processes can work much more rapidly. You can’t really “boom” dispersed oil. Spill responders have to make a fundamental choice when it comes to a big spill. If there is any hope of containing it in booms and recovering it, then that is the obvious choice – and the government (who has to individually approve the use of dispersants on each spill) would never approve the use of dispersants instead of booms. Really big spills, like this one, can’t be boomed and skimmed effectively – especially when they continue for weeks on end. It just can’t be done – at least not in the open ocean. Thus, the “least bad” option is to disperse whatever you can’t contain and skim. I give the government credit for making the call fairly early in this spill to use dispersants, and on a massive scale. That was the right call. Biologists are right to worry about the effects of the dispersed oil, and there will be lots of studies on the pros and cons of letting the oil sit on the surface versus dispersing it into the water column. These studies might change the decision for some subsequent spill… but based on what we know now, dispersing it is the right thing to do. The flip side is that most of the remaining oil won’t boom very well. I’m not saying that boom wouldn’t help at all, or that its use is a complete waste of time… I’m just saying it won’t work as well as it would on fresh, floating oil. – The EPA’s dispersant flip-flop was bureaucratic bungling at its worst. There is an extensive testing process involving toxicity tests (both acute and chronic), for a dispersant to be listed as an “approved” dispersant for spill response use. The one that BP was using was already “pre-approved”, and was stockpiled in large quantities for THIS EXACT SCENARIO. For EPA to step in during the crisis and decide that, well maybe they like a different dispersant better, and BP better find one in 48 hours, borders on criminal negligence on EPA’s part. And, subsequently, EPA was forced to back down once the idiocy of their decision became obvious. It would be hard to find a better example of how these guys can step in and muck things up, while the disaster unfolds around their clueless heads. – The shoreline response is about what I would expect for this type of spill, and has gone pretty well all things considered. BP and NOAA had site-specific trajectory analyses of the spill, and used them at the outset to figure out what to protect first. These models were (and still are) updated on a continuous basis. The models aren’t perfect (kind of like predicting the course of a hurricane), but they are the best way to determine where the spill will go and what will be impacted first. Lots of people were mobilized to place lots of boom in the most likely places. Of course, no one is happy with the boom deployment, because everyone wants THEIR beach/inlet/whatever to be first priority, regardless of what a trajectory model might say. Everybody just screams as loud as they can in hopes that they will win the contest to get boom first, and of the best type for their situation. BP and the USCG are left in the middle of a no-win situation. There will be LOTS of unhappy people, regardless of what they do. – By the way, it isn’t a sign of negligence that there was boom available that had not been deployed. Since it wasn’t clear exactly where the boom would be needed, and there isn’t enough to boom every possible location on the Gulf Coast, it would be prudent to leave some on the boats or on the docks that could be rapidly deployed once it DID become clear where it would be needed. Of course, given the political pressures involved it would be unacceptable not to be seen to be using every foot of boom – especially when thousands of voices are screaming for it. So it gets deployed somewhere, anywhere … probably in the wrong spot, to avoid criticism and at least satisfy somebody in the crowd. Yet another example of how poor decisions are made because of political, not scientific, considerations. UPDATE: Email:

If any person from the government had read something like the post from your emailer at a news conference any time during the first few weeks of the oil spill, a large percentage of Americans, myself included, would have considered the government to be on the ball. And that email took your correspondent maybe an hour or so to write? Hell, it would have made a better speech than the one the President made on Tuesday night. It’s to the point, explains the situation and even places necessary blame (while acknowledging the realities of why decisions were made). There’s even a bit of strategy on how to use models to anticipate where to put booms. And the White House couldn’t come up with something similar? Unreal.