http:\/\/insiderinterviews.nationaljournal.com\/2010\/08\/deepwater-horizons-enduring-le.php<\/p>\n
Deepwater Horizon’s Enduring Lessons<\/p>\n
By James Kitfield<\/p>\n
At some point in the next week, BP will likely initiate the “bottom
\nkill” procedure that permanently plugs the Macondo well, bringing to an
\nend the worst maritime oil spill in American history. No more 24\/7
\nvideo of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. No more weekly tutorials
\non the intricacies of deepwater oil drilling. No more sludge cloud
\nshadowing the Obama administration’s every move in the 2010 summer of
\ndiscontent. Now only the clean-up and long-term repercussions remain to
\nsort out.<\/p>\n
Perhaps no one has a better first-hand grasp of the Deepwater Horizon
\ndisaster than retired Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander
\nwho also coordinated the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
\nRecently, National Journal spoke with Allen about lessons learned from
\nthe crisis and federal response, and how they might affect future
\npolicy. Edited excerpts from that interview follow.<\/p>\n
NJ: How do you respond to critics who say the federal government’s
\nresponse to the Deepwater Horizon disaster was too slow given the
\nmagnitude of the problem?<\/p>\n
Allen: Look at the actual timeline. The explosion on the Deepwater
\nHorizon occurred on April 20th. As commandant of the Coast Guard, I got
\na call just before midnight that there was an uncontrolled fire on a
\nrig in the gulf, with an unknown number of people killed and injured.
\nThat night the Coast Guard evacuated a lot of people from the site of
\nthe explosion, and we launched a two-day search for the 11 workers who
\nwere never found, even as we moved lots of equipment towards the site.
\nThen, early in the afternoon on April 22nd, the entire rig collapsed
\nand sunk. Hours after the rig sunk, I was in the Oval Office along with
\n[Homeland Security Secretary Janet] Napolitano, briefing President
\nObama on our initial response. So I don’t buy the argument that we were
\nslow in responding. I certainly didn’t lean back in the saddle.<\/p>\n
NJ: Did you immediately understand the severity of the crisis?<\/p>\n
Allen: As events unfolded, the enormity of the problem started
\nrevealing itself. We weren’t dealing with a single, monolithic oil
\nslick like the 11 million gallons that spilled from the Exxon Valdez.
\nThis was an uncontrolled discharge, with 53,000 barrels each day
\nspewing in different directions depending on the prevailing winds and
\ncurrents, creating hundreds of thousands of separate oil slicks. The
\nUnited States had never dealt with that situation before. Very quickly
\nwe were forced to spread our assets from the southern Louisiana coast
\nto the Florida panhandle. That’s when we realized that the required
\nresponse was going to dwarf what was anticipated in BP’s response plan.<\/p>\n
NJ: Why did response plans seem so outdated and inadequate to the
\nmagnitude of the crisis?<\/p>\n
Allen: Basically because oil spill response is all predicated on the
\nlessons of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. The legislation that came
\nout of that disaster focused on tanker safety and phasing out single-
\nhull oil tankers, on making sure the party responsible for the disaster
\nmeets its liability requirements, and on cleanup as directed by the Oil
\nPollution Act. That was the regulatory scheme established for
\nresponding to oil spills. However, in the 10 years after that accident,
\nwhile we were primarily focused on the safety of tankers and the Alaska
\npipeline, oil drilling was moving offshore and going deeper underwater.
\nSo the technology changed, and the overall response structure didn’t
\nkeep pace with those changes and the emerging threat. You could say the
\nsame thing about Coast Guard inspection regimes, which we are in the
\nprocess of rethinking. Right now, for instance, the Coast Guard is not
\nrequired to approve a company’s oil spill response plan, because that
\ngoes through the Minerals Management Service. I suspect that will
\nchange in the future.<\/p>\n
NJ: Given that BP seemed so culpable in causing the disaster, did it
\nmake sense that the company also had such a prominent — some would say
\ndominant — role in the cleanup effort?<\/p>\n
Allen: Well, in the regulatory regime created after the Exxon Valdez,
\nBP was the “responsible party” in both statute and regulation, which
\nmeant that it had to bear the costs associated with the spill. For that
\nto happen, however, we had to bring them into the command structure to
\nwrite the checks for everything from boom to catering. As the
\n“responsible party,” BP was also required to have contractors in place
\nto clean up the spill, while the government had oversight over that
\noperation. The public didn’t understand that arrangement very well. The
\nnotion of BP having such a key role in the response after seeming to
\ncause the problem understandably didn’t sit well, and that relationship
\nwas tough to manage. BP had divided loyalties, so to speak. It was
\nresponsible to the public for the cleanup, but at the same time it had
\na fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.<\/p>\n
NJ: Do you think that divided responsibility should be addressed?<\/p>\n
Allen: Well, I think we need to take a very hard look at the role of
\nthe “responsible party” in the command and control of a cleanup
\noperation after an oil spill. You need someone in the command post to
\nrepresent the oil industry, but it might be better if they didn’t have
\na fiduciary connection to a specific corporation. BP might have taken
\nthe resources needed for the cleanup and put them into a blind trust,
\nfor instance, that was administered by a trustee who actually writes
\nthe checks. That might mitigate the appearance of a conflict of
\ninterest in the public’s mind. Ultimately, we need to decide what we
\nreally mean by “responsible party” in these types of situations. It’s a
\nvery interesting public policy question.<\/p>\n
NJ: Do you think it’s a problem that the oil industry has a monopoly on
\nthe technologies involved in deep-sea drilling and oil-well capping?<\/p>\n
Allen: By law, the oil companies had to essentially create a capability
\nin the private sector to respond to oil spills after the Exxon Valdez.
\nThe decision was made by government to rely on private contractors. As
\nyou point out, that reliance was most acute at the wellhead, which was
\nfive miles below the surface of the ocean. There is no government in
\nthe world that owns the means to do deep-sea drilling. Neither the Navy
\nnor the Coast Guard had anything like that capability. The technology
\nwas entirely in the hands of private companies, so the government’s
\nrole at that point became one of oversight. An overarching question as
\nwe look to the future is whether that capability should be solely in
\nthe hands of the private sector, or do you want some measure of that
\ncapability in the public sector so that the government can mount an
\nimmediate response?<\/p>\n
NJ: Doesn’t that question seem all the more important given how little
\ntime and energy BP spent in preparing an adequate spill response?<\/p>\n
Allen: One problem we ran into was that during normal operations, all
\nof the oil produced in the gulf is shipped back to shore via pipelines.
\nWhen we had to bring oil to the surface after the accident, there was
\nno obvious way to transport or collect it. To make that happen, BP had
\nto bring a floating production system from the North Sea that uses
\ntankers to shuttle the oil to shore. To bring the oil to the surface,
\nwe brought in freestanding, floating pipes called “risers” that are
\nused off the shore of Angola. So our solution amounted to the North Sea
\nmeets Angola in the Gulf of Mexico. Lashing all that together took 85
\ndays, because none of it had been put together that way in the past. So
\none lesson we learned is the need for a system like that on day one,
\nrather than on day 85. The oil companies are already thinking hard
\nabout such a system.<\/p>\n
NJ: How do you respond to critics who say the federal government’s
\nresponse to the Deepwater Horizon disaster was too slow given the
\nmagnitude of the problem?<\/p>\n
Allen: Look at the actual timeline. The explosion on the Deepwater
\nHorizon occurred on April 20th. As commandant of the Coast Guard, I got
\na call just before midnight that there was an uncontrolled fire on a
\nrig in the gulf, with an unknown number of people killed and injured.
\nThat night the Coast Guard evacuated a lot of people from the site of
\nthe explosion, and we launched a two-day search for the 11 workers who
\nwere never found, even as we moved lots of equipment towards the site.
\nThen, early in the afternoon on April 22nd, the entire rig collapsed
\nand sunk. Hours after the rig sunk, I was in the Oval Office along with
\n[Homeland Security Secretary Janet] Napolitano, briefing President
\nObama on our initial response. So I don’t buy the argument that we were
\nslow in responding. I certainly didn’t lean back in the saddle.<\/p>\n
NJ: Did you immediately understand the severity of the crisis?<\/p>\n
Allen: As events unfolded, the enormity of the problem started
\nrevealing itself. We weren’t dealing with a single, monolithic oil
\nslick like the 11 million gallons that spilled from the Exxon Valdez.
\nThis was an uncontrolled discharge, with 53,000 barrels each day
\nspewing in different directions depending on the prevailing winds and
\ncurrents, creating hundreds of thousands of separate oil slicks. The
\nUnited States had never dealt with that situation before. Very quickly
\nwe were forced to spread our assets from the southern Louisiana coast
\nto the Florida panhandle. That’s when we realized that the required
\nresponse was going to dwarf what was anticipated in BP’s response plan.<\/p>\n
NJ: Why did response plans seem so outdated and inadequate to the
\nmagnitude of the crisis?<\/p>\n
Allen: Basically because oil spill response is all predicated on the
\nlessons of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. The legislation that came
\nout of that disaster focused on tanker safety and phasing out single-
\nhull oil tankers, on making sure the party responsible for the disaster
\nmeets its liability requirements, and on cleanup as directed by the Oil
\nPollution Act. That was the regulatory scheme established for
\nresponding to oil spills. However, in the 10 years after that accident,
\nwhile we were primarily focused on the safety of tankers and the Alaska
\npipeline, oil drilling was moving offshore and going deeper underwater.
\nSo the technology changed, and the overall response structure didn’t
\nkeep pace with those changes and the emerging threat. You could say the
\nsame thing about Coast Guard inspection regimes, which we are in the
\nprocess of rethinking. Right now, for instance, the Coast Guard is not
\nrequired to approve a company’s oil spill response plan, because that
\ngoes through the Minerals Management Service. I suspect that will
\nchange in the future.<\/p>\n
NJ: Given that BP seemed so culpable in causing the disaster, did it
\nmake sense that the company also had such a prominent — some would say
\ndominant — role in the cleanup effort?<\/p>\n
Allen: Well, in the regulatory regime created after the Exxon Valdez,
\nBP was the “responsible party” in both statute and regulation, which
\nmeant that it had to bear the costs associated with the spill. For that
\nto happen, however, we had to bring them into the command structure to
\nwrite the checks for everything from boom to catering. As the
\n“responsible party,” BP was also required to have contractors in place
\nto clean up the spill, while the government had oversight over that
\noperation. The public didn’t understand that arrangement very well. The
\nnotion of BP having such a key role in the response after seeming to
\ncause the problem understandably didn’t sit well, and that relationship
\nwas tough to manage. BP had divided loyalties, so to speak. It was
\nresponsible to the public for the cleanup, but at the same time it had
\na fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.<\/p>\n
NJ: Do you think that divided responsibility should be addressed?<\/p>\n
Allen: Well, I think we need to take a very hard look at the role of
\nthe “responsible party” in the command and control of a cleanup
\noperation after an oil spill. You need someone in the command post to
\nrepresent the oil industry, but it might be better if they didn’t have
\na fiduciary connection to a specific corporation. BP might have taken
\nthe resources needed for the cleanup and put them into a blind trust,
\nfor instance, that was administered by a trustee who actually writes
\nthe checks. That might mitigate the appearance of a conflict of
\ninterest in the public’s mind. Ultimately, we need to decide what we
\nreally mean by “responsible party” in these types of situations. It’s a
\nvery interesting public policy question.<\/p>\n
NJ: Do you think it’s a problem that the oil industry has a monopoly on
\nthe technologies involved in deep-sea drilling and oil-well capping?<\/p>\n
Allen: By law, the oil companies had to essentially create a capability
\nin the private sector to respond to oil spills after the Exxon Valdez.
\nThe decision was made by government to rely on private contractors. As
\nyou point out, that reliance was most acute at the wellhead, which was
\nfive miles below the surface of the ocean. There is no government in
\nthe world that owns the means to do deep-sea drilling. Neither the Navy
\nnor the Coast Guard had anything like that capability. The technology
\nwas entirely in the hands of private companies, so the government’s
\nrole at that point became one of oversight. An overarching question as
\nwe look to the future is whether that capability should be solely in
\nthe hands of the private sector, or do you want some measure of that
\ncapability in the public sector so that the government can mount an
\nimmediate response?<\/p>\n
NJ: Doesn’t that question seem all the more important given how little
\ntime and energy BP spent in preparing an adequate spill response?<\/p>\n
Allen: One problem we ran into was that during normal operations, all
\nof the oil produced in the gulf is shipped back to shore via pipelines.
\nWhen we had to bring oil to the surface after the accident, there was
\nno obvious way to transport or collect it. To make that happen, BP had
\nto bring a floating production system from the North Sea that uses
\ntankers to shuttle the oil to shore. To bring the oil to the surface,
\nwe brought in freestanding, floating pipes called “risers” that are
\nused off the shore of Angola. So our solution amounted to the North Sea
\nmeets Angola in the Gulf of Mexico. Lashing all that together took 85
\ndays, because none of it had been put together that way in the past. So
\none lesson we learned is the need for a system like that on day one,
\nrather than on day 85. The oil companies are already thinking hard
\nabout such a system.<\/p>\n
NJ: As was the case with Hurricane Katrina, there seemed to be
\nsignificant tensions, disconnects and finger-pointing between federal,
\nstate and local authorities. Is that inevitable in trying to mount
\n“whole of government” responses to far-reaching disasters? Allen: I
\nthink these efforts will always be, in some ways, unique and a work in
\nprogress. Any time there is a gap between what local officials want and
\nwhat they see being done on the federal level, there’s going to be
\npointed discussions about the best way forward. And to paraphrase Tip
\nO’Neill, all oil spills are local. They manifest themselves differently
\nin different places, depending in part on varying types of local
\ngovernment and political structures. I’m there to provide unity of
\neffort, for instance, and the law assumes I interface with state
\nofficials, who in turn interact with their local officials. In places
\nwhere you have more autonomous home rule, such as Louisiana’s parishes,
\nhowever, the challenge of smoothly integrating federal, state and local
\nresponses is greater. We also ran into the problem that some of the
\naffected areas along Louisiana’s coast were really isolated and
\ndifficult to get to, and that only added to the complexity of the
\noperation.<\/p>\n
NJ: Would you change methods for estimating the scope of an oil spill,
\nespecially in light of widespread suspicions that BP and the government
\nunderestimated the amount of oil dispersed into the gulf?<\/p>\n
Allen: I think for any future oil spills we should rely only on
\nofficial government estimates based on the findings of an independent
\nteam of scientists. That was ultimately the solution we adopted. There
\nwas so much angst over how much oil was spilling that I created a flow-
\nrate technology team of scientists led by the head of the U.S.
\nGeological Survey. They estimated that the well was spilling 53,000
\nbarrels a day into the gulf, plus or minus 10 percent. That’s how we
\ncame up with the top-line figure of 4.9 million barrels. That’s a lot
\nof oil.<\/p>\n
NJ: Is it enough oil to cause you personally to question the wisdom of
\ndeepwater drilling?<\/p>\n
Allen: Whenever I’m asked that question, my reply is the same: That’s
\nway above my pay grade. I will say that in this case we had a “fail-
\nsafe” system that turned out not to be fail-safe. So if we are going to
\ncontinue to allow drilling at 5,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, on
\na seabed that only robots can reach and where operations resemble
\nApollo 13 more than a standard oil drilling operation, then we had
\ncertainly better know how to deal with another failure if it were to
\noccur.<\/p>\n
NJ: You’ve had a direct hand in responding to devastating crises
\nranging from the 9\/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina to the earthquake
\nin Haiti and the gulf oil spill. Have you drawn any overriding lessons
\nabout the nature of government responses to such destructive incidents?<\/p>\n
Allen: When considering future responses to big events like these, I
\nthink we will have to decide on a social contract that spells out what
\ncitizens can expect from their government. Because the universe of
\npotential interventions, and the expectations of the citizenry, are
\nboth growing in ways that outstrip traditional funding sources and
\nstatutory guidelines. For instance, what’s the government’s
\nresponsibility for dealing with the long-term socioeconomic and
\nbehavioral health impacts of these events? Nowhere in government
\nstatute or regulations will you find guidance on how to deal with those
\nkinds of issues. I don’t know if a whole society can acquire post-
\ntraumatic stress disorder, but you definitely see disaster fatigue set
\nin after these major events. You can see it in the gulf region right
\nnow. So we as a nation are ultimately going to have to deal with the
\npublic policy issues raised by these big national traumas.<\/p>\n
Special thanks to Richard Charter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
http:\/\/insiderinterviews.nationaljournal.com\/2010\/08\/deepwater-horizons-enduring-le.php Deepwater Horizon’s Enduring Lessons By James Kitfield At some point in the next week, BP will likely initiate the “bottom kill” procedure that permanently plugs the Macondo well, bringing to an end the worst maritime oil spill in American history. No more 24\/7 video of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. No more … Continue reading National Journal Interview with Thad Allen<\/span>