Starting Points: oil spill

Showing posts with label oil spill. Show all posts

Jul 6, 2010

What Obama Should Have Said to BP | The New York Review of Books

Jim Young/Reuters

Governor Charlie Crist and Barack Obama at Casino Beach, Pensacola, Florida, June 15, 2010

Barack Obama’s demand, in his June 15 speech, that the former British Petroleum Company create an escrow account, to guarantee the funds that will be needed to deal with the consequences of the continuing catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, should have been made weeks ago, and should surely have been framed more strongly than it was.

The President, in this matter, continues to demonstrate the quality, laudable in itself, but in politics extraordinarily dangerous, of assuming that those he is dealing with are as reasonable and well-intentioned as he is himself. In fact they are often driven by ruthlessly self-interested motives that leave him in a position of seeming weakness and unwillingness to defend not only national but his own political interests.

At the end of May one saw the President on international television walking on a Louisiana beach, accompanied—off-scene—by hundreds if not thousands of newsmen, broadcasters, and cameramen. He seemed abject. He bent over and picked up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. He shook his head in concern. A cutaway showed his speeches earlier in this affair declaring that his administration is in charge of the great effort to save America’s coast and waters from the terrible pollution that is spreading as a result of a volcano of oil erupting from the sea’s floor and meeting the sickly-colored, toxic chemicals being mixed into the water that are meant to disperse it.

In his June 15 speech, Mr. Obama finally insisted that BP would pay for all the damage and cleanup and would be held responsible for any illegalities; and the next day at the White House BP agreed to an independently administered $20 billion escrow fund, while the full costs to the Gulf region are far from clear.

In the press conferences given by the President and the BP chairman that followed the meeting it was clear that the American government still does not control this situation. BP alone will determine what is done with respect to the oil geyser and its promised closure. While it will make available the $20 billion compensation fund, the timing, terms, and ultimate worth of BP’s assurances of compensation and reparation remain open to interpretation and change.

How can the President possibly say that his administration has “been in charge”? BP has been in charge from the start—it and its contract companies, all of them desperately trying to plug the hole in the bottom of the sea, and all defending corporate and fiscal interests of their own. The President’s associates and advisers have apparently decided that the agencies of the United States government are technically incompetent to give instructions to BP, which seems improbable. But they certainly can and must tell BP what priorities must be set, and they must establish goals to be met, and on what timescale.

BP’s lawyers and lobbyists have just as desperately been striving to allow BP to unload responsibility upon anyone or everyone else, including incompetent or irresponsible or compromised federal regulators.

Allow me, in the style of the metropolitan columnists who influence Washington, to draft what the President might have said in his June 15 speech:

“My friends:

“The American nation has suffered a grievous blow from the catastrophe produced in the Gulf by what formerly was known as the British Petroleum Company. This is the latest in a series of major accidents produced in this company’s American operations, causing loss of lives among its workers, unforgivable human suffering by private citizens, and great damage to private and public interests, continuing today in the Gulf.

“I have therefore today given orders that the American functions of this company be provisionally seized, or placed in temporary receivership, by the American government, as in recent months we have been forced to seize banks and corporations devastated by economic crisis, such as General Motors, AIG, and certain financial institutions.

“BP’s American management will be placed under public authority and will be instructed to terminate the oil emergency as rapidly as possible and in disregard of whatever costs must be incurred by the company. This effort will be conducted by BP through its own best efforts, closely supervised by officers of the United States Coast Guard and Navy, the Energy and Treasury Departments of our government, and will be accompanied by an investigation by the Justice Department and its executive agencies, including the FBI, for any possible evidence of fraud, malfeasance or profiteering, contributing to this disaster. None of these agencies of government will incur any responsibility whatever for the decisions and actions of BP while conducting its operations to terminate the oil blowout.

“In no circumstances will company, proprietary, or stockholder interest be given priority over measures to terminate this emergency and to safeguard the assets or interests of the United States public or government. No funds of this company shall be expended on political lobbying intended to influence Congress or the executive agencies of federal government until this emergency has formally been determined to have been ended.

“Clearly, losses to British pension funds and other British shareholders of BP should be of concern to the British government. However those individuals and institutions investing in companies with notoriously controversial histories assume the accompanying risks.

“The Oil Pollution Act signed into law in 1990 greatly expanded the US government’s ability and resources necessary to respond to oil spills; and it does not preempt state action to impose additional liability, which may be unlimited, with penalties and damages in addition to federal liabilities that may extend to prison sentences.

“I am instructing that all BP assets within the United States, or in its surrounding waters, including funds immediately at its disposal, and all other BP funds accessible to the United States government, be temporarily seized and sequestered so as to prevent the transfer of any funds or assets of this company outside United States jurisdiction and access. The disposition of those assets will eventually be determined by the courts or by a new independent federal agency, with priority given to the reimbursement of persons and property-holders victimized by this catastrophe, and the redressment of damage or destruction to public assets and municipal, state, and national interests for which the former British Petroleum corporation is deemed by the courts, or by the independent agency, to have been responsible.”

This is what the American people wanted to hear. President Obama wishes to be seen as decisive and a leader? Here was his opportunity. He wants a Democratic Congress elected in the fall? And a second presidential term for himself? This could have made a decisive contribution to those ambitions, as well as assuring necessary help to millions of people and repairing grave damage to the environment.

He then could have concluded his speech by saying to his political opponents that any Republican or Democrat who wishes to run for office in November as an opponent of these Obama administration crisis measures—and as a defender of BP corporate and stockholder interests, or its customary executive remuneration and financial practices—as against the national interest of the United States and redress of the damage that continues at this moment to be done to the United States and its citizens, would be more than welcome to do so.

Jul 2, 2010

Why Is the Gulf Cleanup So Slow?

Image via Wikipedia

By PAUL H. RUBIN

Destin, Fla.

As the oil spill continues and the cleanup lags, we must begin to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions. There does not seem to be much that anyone can do to stop the spill except dig a relief well, not due until August. But the cleanup is a different story. The press and Internet are full of straightforward suggestions for easy ways of improving the cleanup, but the federal government is resisting these remedies.

First, the Environmental Protection Agency can relax restrictions on the amount of oil in discharged water, currently limited to 15 parts per million. In normal times, this rule sensibly controls the amount of pollution that can be added to relatively clean ocean water. But this is not a normal time.

Various skimmers and tankers (some of them very large) are available that could eliminate most of the oil from seawater, discharging the mostly clean water while storing the oil onboard. While this would clean vast amounts of water efficiently, the EPA is unwilling to grant a temporary waiver of its regulations.

Next, the Obama administration can waive the Jones Act, which restricts foreign ships from operating in U.S. coastal waters. Many foreign countries (such as the Netherlands and Belgium) have ships and technologies that would greatly advance the cleanup. So far, the U.S. has refused to waive the restrictions of this law and allow these ships to participate in the effort.

The combination of these two regulations is delaying and may even prevent the world's largest skimmer, the Taiwanese owned "A Whale," from deploying. This 10-story high ship can remove almost as much oil in a day as has been removed in total—roughly 500,000 barrels of oily water per day. The tanker is steaming towards the Gulf, hoping it will receive Coast Guard and EPA approval before it arrives.

In addition, the federal government can free American-based skimmers. Of the 2,000 skimmers in the U.S. (not subject to the Jones Act or other restrictions), only 400 have been sent to the Gulf. Federal barriers have kept the others on stations elsewhere in case of other oil spills, despite the magnitude of the current crisis. The Coast Guard and the EPA issued a joint temporary rule suspending the regulation on June 29—more than 70 days after the spill.

The Obama administration can also permit more state and local initiatives. The media endlessly report stories of county and state officials applying federal permits to perform various actions, such as building sand berms around the Louisiana coast. In some cases, they were forbidden from acting. In others there have been extensive delays in obtaining permission.

As the government fails to implement such simple and straightforward remedies, one must ask why.

One possibility is sheer incompetence. Many critics of the president are fond of pointing out that he had no administrative or executive experience before taking office. But the government is full of competent people, and the military and Coast Guard can accomplish an assigned mission. In any case, several remedies require nothing more than getting out of the way.

Another possibility is that the administration places a higher priority on interests other than the fate of the Gulf, such as placating organized labor, which vigorously defends the Jones Act.

Finally there is the most pessimistic explanation—that the oil spill may be viewed as an opportunity, the way White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said back in February 2009, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Many administration supporters are opposed to offshore oil drilling and are already employing the spill as a tool for achieving other goals. The websites of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, for example, all feature the oil spill as an argument for forbidding any further offshore drilling or for any use of fossil fuels at all. None mention the Jones Act.

To these organizations and perhaps to some in the administration, the oil spill may be a strategic justification in a larger battle. President Obama has already tried to severely limit drilling in the Gulf, using his Oval Office address on June 16 to demand that we "embrace a clean energy future." In the meantime, how about a cleaner Gulf?

Mr. Rubin, a professor of economics at Emory University, held several senior positions in the federal government in the 1980s. Since 1991 he has spent his summers on the Gulf.

WSJ, July 2, 2010

Jun 27, 2010

Vietnamese shrimpers face financial ruin after oil spill

Image by MyMcClellanville via Flickr

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 27, 2010; A01

NEW ORLEANS -- They came here seeking refuge, but the past few years have brought unexpected hardship to the tightly knit Vietnamese fishing community.

They arrived after the fall of Saigon in 1975, lured by the city's tropical climate and strong Catholic heritage. Shrimping and fishing in the Gulf Coast's bountiful bayous was one of the few familiar touchstones for these mostly unskilled laborers with little English.

An estimated 20,000 Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers live along the Gulf Coast -- about half of the total fishing community -- and many more work at the seafood processing plants, wholesalers and po-boy shops found at every traffic light. Now the sanctuary they found and the lives they built -- and rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina -- are threatened by the hemorrhaging oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Many Vietnamese worry they will not have the energy to start over yet again.

"When I came to Louisiana, this was how people here made a living. I had to follow," 50-year-old shrimper Dung Nguyen says in Vietnamese. "I don't know how I'm going to live."

Image by OneEighteen via Flickr

Nguyen says he has no idea whether life is harder for him than for American shrimpers; he doesn't know any to ask. All he knows is that his wife, their five daughters, his mother-in-law and his granddaughter -- all of whom live with him in a modest rented home in the industrial eastern edge of New Orleans -- are counting on him for survival.

That's why he got up before dawn last week to stand in line for a food voucher with dozens of other out-of-work Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers in the concrete alley in front of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church's community office. The wait can last five, six, even seven hours.

Oversleepers are turned away before they even make it inside.

"If you're a little bit late . . . ," Nguyen warns in Vietnamese, shaking his head.

He knows because he showed up after 5 a.m. for two days and missed out on a $100 grocery store gift certificate, 20 of which are handed out every morning. It is 8:30 a.m. and the office has yet to open, but he is hoping the third time is the charm. Besides, he says, he has nothing to do all day but sit around and think -- about having no work, no money and no options.

Normally Nguyen is on a boat this time of year, coming ashore for a home visit about once a month. His wife, Ut, makes shrimp nets, and his oldest daughter, Lisa, 20, fixes trawls and cleans boats. Now they are all unemployed.

"Get in a straight line, please," a woman calls out in English to the group, mostly men, milling about the alley as staffers open the office door.

The Vietnamese quickly flatten themselves along the wall as aid workers hand out numbered tickets for vouchers to the first in line. Dung secures one, as does his wife, even though the vouchers are technically limited to one per family. Because so many Vietnamese share the same last name and the community is so intertwined, the rule is tough to enforce.

"Three days. One hundred," Nguyen says in his broken English.

Another friend overhears him and laughs. It's not in your hand, yet, he cautions.

Strong bonds strained

Nguyen came to this country late, in 1992, and drifted through blue-collar jobs in Arizona and California before he fell into shrimping in Louisiana.

The couple have lived in New Orleans the longest of any place in the United States. The cost of living is cheap, and work seemed plentiful. They rented their first house here and made friends quickly. Nguyen says he recognizes everyone waiting with him in the food voucher line.

More than two months after the oil spill all but shut down the local seafood industry, the bonds that tie the community together are fraying as they face financial ruin.

A fight broke out on a recent morning after aid workers ran out of food vouchers. Now a security officer guards the alley, sweltering in his brown uniform in the soupy heat. A meeting between BP and Vietnamese fishermen dissolved after translators used northern Vietnamese phrases that many here associate with communism.

New interpreters have been installed.

"People are really frustrated," says Tap Bui, a community organizer at the church. "They feel like their sense of life is gone . . . A lot of them feel like they'll never be able to get that back."

Although the Vietnamese community is centered in eastern New Orleans, it stretches from the marshes of Plaquemines Parish through Biloxi, Miss., and Gulf Shores, Ala., and throughout the seafood industry's supply chain. Vinh Tran, 60, began working as a deckhand on shrimp boats when he immigrated 35 years ago and eventually bought his own boats and opened a shrimp dock and wholesale market named St. Vincent's in the one-road bayou town of Leeville, La.

Now his daughter-in-law, Ngoc Nguyen, 27, runs the business and worries that even with aid they will not last through the year. In two months last summer, St. Vincent's took in 2 million pounds of shrimp. This year, they've done less than a third of that. The bait shop next door has already closed.

"This should've been our best season yet," she says.

Ngoc Nguyen, who is not related to Dung, was studying to be a nurse when Katrina hit in 2005 and changed the course of her life. Her now-husband's family needed help with St. Vincent's, so she stepped in. She says they owe $700,000 in loans for the shop and their three boats. Although she and her husband have received some money from BP, Nguyen says it's not enough to cover their expenses, let alone the interest on their loans. The story is the same throughout the Vietnamese community.

"We didn't invest in anything but the seafood business," Ngoc Nguyen says.

To Texas for work

It rains three times before Dung Nguyen's name is called at Mary Queen of Vietnam. He walks into a small room and sits down in front of a large wooden desk while the aid worker reviews his file. He utters no words other than his name and birthdate. The aid worker asks few questions.

After six hours of waiting, Nguyen receives a $100 gift certificate to a local Vietnamese grocery store, Mien Canh. A few minutes later, his wife comes out of a similar meeting with another gift certificate, a canister of rice and two cans of Starkist tuna.

They climb into their minivan and head home, where they get more good news: A shrimp boat captain is looking for deckhands to run out to Texas the next morning. Nguyen has never shrimped that far before, but he says he'll take it.

He makes plans with his neighbor, Trung Le, for the two-hour drive down to the dock to get on the boat. Le will spend the night at Nguyen's house, and by 6 p.m. he's there with his duffel bag, ready to commandeer the couch. They buy spicy boiled crawfish and crack open some Bud Lights. The local news is playing on the TV, and the forecast is gloomy. What if it rains? What if there is a big storm?

"Everything, I don't care," Le says in English. "Go."

But the celebration is cut short when Nguyen gets another call.

The shrimp boat is having mechanical trouble. It will take a day, maybe longer, to fix it. The trip is canceled.

Nguyen hangs up the phone and takes stock of his options. He heard that BP is holding a deckhand training class 20 minutes away in Slidell tomorrow morning, but he's not sure of the address or whether he needs special paperwork to attend. Maybe he can just show up? Or maybe the shrimp boat will get fixed before the morning.

Nguyen doesn't know that he can look up the address of the BP class online. He'd have trouble reading it if he did, not to mention that it will be taught by a white-haired man with a heavy Southern accent who will be talking about subjects like "oil weathering" and "the displacement of vapors heavier than oxygen." He doesn't know yet that the shrimping job will never materialize, and he will be back at square one.

But Nguyen says uncertainty is the nature of his trade. He cannot control when the work comes, how long it will last or even if it will turn up. That's up to the boat captain, to Mother Nature or even BP.

So Nguyen sits on a stool at his coffee table, sips a Bud Light and waits for something to happen.

Jun 18, 2010

The last of Leeville: Chances grow slim for a wide spot in the road in La.

Image via Wikipedia

By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 18, 2010; C01

LEEVILLE, LA. -- Their eyes are bloodshot. Their scraggy skin glows reddish-brown. They clutch cans of beer. On the wooden deck of Griffin's Marina and Ice, they recoil when approached, like a nest of vipers.

"We used to be fishermen," one sneers, drunk, seething with wounded pride. "But now we work for BP."

They won't say more than that. From their perch, they glare across the silent street at the gorgeous marshland now closed to fishing. At dusk they screech away in pickup trucks, barely pausing at the town's one blinking traffic light. They surrender Leeville to shadow, to the mosquitoes, to what used to be and now isn't, to a solemn reality captured in two words that embody the collapse of a way of life.

Ghost town.

This summer may mark the end of Leeville, a town birthed by a hurricane, then destroyed by one, resurrected by oil and now destroyed by oil. It isn't the only dying town outside the levee systems in south Louisiana. Subsidence, the sinking of delta land, has long been the existential enemy down here. Now wild crude has delivered what may be the final blow, choking off commerce. Some residents foresee an abandoned landscape, something right out of a Wild West movie, with empty slips instead of silent saloons, belly-up redfish instead of skittering tumbleweeds.

* * *

At the blinking traffic light, most drivers turn right and glide over the bayou to Port Fourchon, which services 90 percent of deep-water drilling structures in the Gulf of Mexico. Then it's on to Grand Isle, a paradise for sunbathers and beachfront property owners.

Confused drivers proceed through the light, past the sign that says "NO OUTLET," past two gas stations, four RV parks, a half-dozen bait-and-tackle shops, two motels and one bar, then run smack into a "ROAD CLOSED" sign just before pavement halts at the marsh.

That was Leeville. About a mile long, hugged by bayou, full-time home to a handful of people. No more than 60. Maybe not even 30. No one knows. Right now there should be hundreds of visiting fishermen leasing their own heavenly corner of the town's bayou front, but with waters closed by the Deepwater Horizon leak, there's no reason to come, no reason to stay.

For decades, storm surges have swallowed 14 square miles every year in the basins of Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. Last year the state redirected Highway 1 around Leeville to elevate the hurricane evacuation route. The town's only thoroughfare became a dead end. Now residents worry that a hurricane will drench the area with oil this summer, killing the root structure that keeps the very earth together.

Leeville will be gone.

"To me, Leeville was gone 20 years ago," says Windell Curole, general manager of the South Lafourche Levee District, who says the town was 90 percent marsh in the '60s and is now 90 percent underwater. "When we did not take the action to protect the marshes around Leeville, that was the beginning of the end. The communities in southern Louisiana remain here despite floodwaters because this place produces tremendous amounts of biomass. A 7-year-old can go fish in back and catch enough food to feed his family."

Not now.

* * *

Hardly anyone's home. Maybe a half-dozen of 200 RV and camper spots remain occupied. Rusted carnage from Katrina, Rita, Ike and Gustav litters the roadside. Trailers are tacked with cheeky decals saying things like: "If You Don't Fish Then Why Am I Talking to You?"

The heat comes from every direction, even the ground. It's quiet.

Bobby Bryan sits in his motorized wheelchair in his home at the southern tip of town. Lace curtains checker the late-afternoon sunlight. There is nothing to do. Bryan can't operate his fishing guide business. There are no tenants in his 26-slot RV park. He has time to think.

Every Saturday 70 years ago, Bryan's mother would bake biscuits, load her 10 children into the family wagon upstate, get to the bayou and catch fish for lunch. They'd spend the day on the water. The water was life.

Fifty-seven years ago, when Bobby married his wife, Juanita, their marriage vows were: (1) He would always make sure she could go to church; and (2) She'd always leave him alone while he was fishing.

They moved to Leeville in 1990 to open the RV park and Marsh Masters Guide Service. Their son and grandson followed. The Bryans are still paying off the land. Katrina flooded their home, Rita ripped the roof off. A second mortgage was in order. BP cut them a check for June. They're grateful, even though it's not enough to cover insurance, lost revenue, repairs and what they assume is the plummeting value of their property.

"We're too old to start over," Juanita says, sitting under a portrait of a smiling Jesus holding a fishing net.

"I'd compare it to prison," says Bobby, 76.

"All you can do is put your faith in God," Juanita says.

God, right now, is an oil company.

BP "said they're gonna make me whole," Bobby says. "I'm waiting to see what that means."

Their 24-year-old grandson, Matthew, pulls into the RV park around 6 p.m. in a pickup truck.

"I'm more of a realist," says Matthew, who works construction on a new Highway 1 bridge while his father, an out-of-work guide for Marsh Masters, does contract cleanup for BP. "I see this as the beginning of another depression if the rigs and waters don't reopen. We'll lose everything that goes with it: the money, the culture, the traditions that weren't even mine yet."

* * *

In 1893 a hurricane blew its French-speaking survivors 12 miles inland from the coastal settlement of Cheniere Caminada, near modern-day Grand Isle. They bought tracts for $12.50 each and founded Leeville. They farmed, fished, trapped. Oranges hung heavy in verdant groves surrounded by rice fields. The land was three to four feet higher back then. In 1915 a hurricane pulverized all but one of the 100 houses in town. The Cajun families continued their generational march inland, leaving Leeville to languish until 1930, when a forest of derricks sprouted to pump newly discovered oil. When the shallow fields dried up, the fertile bayous continued to support fishermen, oystermen and shrimpers.

For 20 years Leeville has been a bustling outpost for the oil and fishing industries. Ice whooshed from freezers to coolers on sloops and tugboats. Sausage sizzled on the griddles of mom-and-pop eateries. Vacationing retirees gathered for 4 p.m. coffee every day in the Bryans' RV park.

Then the super-hurricanes came. Then the highway was rerouted. Then the waters were closed.

Griffin's Marina and Ice has lost 90 percent of its customers and laid off five employees. The Griffin family, who set up shop in 1977, filed claims with BP but haven't seen any money yet. At Leeville Seafood Restaurant, only three tables are occupied at dinnertime, when normally 75 fishermen would be scarfing stuffed soft-shells with special "Leeville crab sauce."

Owners Sue and Harris Cheramie, whose fathers were both shrimpers, sip Diet Coke. The oil slick is sinking them, they say, but the rigs need to operate. Drilling is a gamble, but it's a gamble that needs to be made again and again.

"This country cannot run without oil," Harris says. "We need it for plastic, fiberglass, that shirt you're wearing, that chair you're sitting on. We'll need oil for the rest of our lives, in some way."

The renters at Leeville RV Park have skipped town, itching to break their year-long leases. Terry Serigny, whose family helped found Leeville and who was raised here on houseboats, turned off the freezers at his bait shop when he closed last month. He hopes to receive a second $5,000 payment from BP soon.

"This is tearing us up," says Serigny, 57. "When everybody looks at each other, you can see it in people's eyes. We've fought recessions, and storm after storm. We can't fight this. . . . I don't have no other place to live. I only went to the sixth grade. It would be hard for me to wear a tie and have a briefcase and look for a job."

Leeville is still a slice of paradise, says Lynn LeBlanc Gros, who co-owns Bobby Lynn's Marina. In the mornings she goes to her dock, sees white egrets flying, hears porpoises surfacing for breath. She daydreams about every Cajun picking up a shovel to build another levee to stop the oil from reaching these marshes.

* * *

At night, the only sound is the buzz of air-conditioning. The last fisherman has fled the deck at Griffin's. It's dark by the water, except for the blue glow of an iPhone aboard the St. Vincent, a docked shrimping boat. Vu Vo, a 24-year-old deckhand, is waiting for his cousins to call about working for BP. He goes into the cabin, where a Jet Li movie dubbed in Vietnamese is paused on a TV, and wonders what he'll do if he can't get a cleanup gig.

"This is like all I know," Vo says of shrimping.

At the outdoor washeteria up the street, security contractors shove quarters into the laundry machines. They're working 14-hour days and staying at the motels across the street. By 10 p.m. some of them wind up at the only bar in town, Pappy's Place, where they throw back shots of Southern Comfort. The jukebox shuffles between Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. A strand of colored Christmas lights dangles over liquor bottles. The owner, Harris Ebanks, immigrated from Honduras in 1974, wound up in Leeville by accident and decided to stay.

He looks at the rowdy young security personnel around the pool table, then at the three regulars sitting at the bar. They're pissed off, drinking Bud Light, narrowing their eyes at the out-of-towners. They say Leeville's dead, that people are starting to starve, that lawlessness is coming, that despondency has already arrived. Townspeople cut the grass over and over to pass time. The natural order is upset. Fishermen aren't meant to be mopping up oil in white hazmat suits.

"That's not these guys," says Wayne Thomas, a welder from Baton Rouge who retired to Leeville with his camper. "These boys are a dying breed. I'm sad to see our culture -- the culture of living off the land -- is gonna die because of a screw-up that could've been fixed before it happened."

The town should be teeming right now, says Geraldine Busey, who works at Tyd's tackle shop up the street. Instead it's a ghost town. Everyone who's left is slowly going crazy.

She feeds $5 bills into a poker video game by the bar, punching DEAL, DRAW and HOLD. Her investment evaporates slowly. GAME OVER flashes on the screen again and again. She puts more bills in.

The only thing you can do, says her husband, William, is hope and wait, here on a bar stool. Hope and wait.

After a couple more rounds of beer, Geraldine screams. "Ah! I got the four deuces!"

The screen flashes WINNER, WINNER. Her pot rockets to $141.25.

Cash out, Geraldine, the men say. Cash out.

"I'm gonna keep playing," she says.

She slips another five into the machine. DEAL. DRAW. HOLD.

GAME OVER.

DEAL. DRAW. HOLD.

GAME OVER.

Jun 9, 2010

Obama and BP at Risk Over Oil Spill

http://images.businessweek.com/mz/10/24/600/1024_mz_07openingremarks.jpg

Obama examines some of the effects of a spreading crisis Larry Downing/Reuters

As the Gulf spill threatens to sink BP and damage a Presidency, it's time for Obama to rally the U.S. around tough, fair regulation—for the good of capitalism

By Paul M. Barrett

With failure heaped upon failure in the Gulf of Mexico, the environmental disaster now threatens the viability of not only a vast corporation but also a U.S. Presidency. The buck stops with both—one financially, the other politically. Can either recover?

The markets sent ominous signals about BP's (BP) future once it became clear over the Memorial Day Weekend that the top-kill plugging maneuver had not worked. In the Gulf, hurricane season has arrived, bringing with it the prospect of fierce storms chasing rescue ships to shore and spreading the sickening oil slick farther along the southern coast. A long, grim summer seems all but certain.

Its shares sharply depleted, BP, the largest oil and gas producer in the U.S., suddenly seems vulnerable to a breakup or takeover. In Washington, the Obama team appears to be flailing. Trying to assert some form of authority, the President vowed to bring wrongdoers to justice. The promise seemed mostly like a distraction from frustrating reality: In the short term, President Obama can do little, if anything, to stanch the gushing well.

As much as any other challenge—Wall Street, health care, Afghanistan—the oil spill may define Obama as a leader. He either will find a way to rise to this occasion and make some broader use of the crisis in the Gulf, or it will permanently taint him.

Deficient Oversight

This is a moment to think big and creatively. As distant as risky drilling rigs off Louisiana may seem from the New York financial laboratories where wizard bankers synthesized subprime credit derivatives, Obama could explain the important connections: how, after decades of antiregulatory fundamentalism in Washington, the feckless Minerals Management Service became the Securities & Exchange Commission of the oil business.

It is no coincidence that staff members at both agencies watched pornography on government computers when they should have been monitoring their respective beats. Although corruption and incompetence seem to have run deeper at the soon-to-be-dismantled MMS, the zeitgeist of the two places was similar, according to investigations and congressional hearings: Industry was to be trusted, even when government overseers had no more idea what transpired on the trading floor at Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns than they did on the ocean floor beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

The question is: What will Obama do about it?

One route to political rehabilitation would be to redefine how government interacts with business. The goal he should articulate is protecting capitalism—and the society it's intended to serve—from the tendency of the profit-minded to go to extremes.

Takeover Prospects

Profit-minded investors, meanwhile, have soured on BP. "We are very negative on the prospects for BP, and this situation has a real possibility of breaking the company," London-based investment bank Arbuthnot Securities said in a June 1 research note. That day the British energy giant's shares dropped as much as 17 percent in London, their biggest one-day decline in 18 years. The company's stock flattened on June 2, closing down 34 percent since the Deepwater Horizon exploded Apr. 20. That erased more than $58 billion (40 billion pounds) from BP's value.

Ivor Pether, who helps manage $9.2 billion at Royal London Asset Management, including BP stock, told Bloomberg News: "We're getting into share price territory where analysts speculate about takeover possibilities, because the loss of market value is much greater than the estimated 'worst case' costs." Buyers haven't surfaced yet, he added, "because the near-term uncertainty is so high." BP spokeswoman Sheila Williams declined to comment.

The company's woes grew worse when the Obama Administration announced June 1 that it will investigate potential criminal and civil violations related to the spill. "We will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said. While Holder didn't get into particulars, troubling facts have already surfaced. The House Energy & Commerce Committee released internal BP e-mail showing that company employees had worried six weeks before the rig explosion that workers were struggling to control the well below. A criminal indictment of BP and other companies involved in the accident—perhaps for infractions of the Clean Water Act or other environmental laws—"is very likely," David M. Uhlmann, a former chief of the Justice Dept.'s environmental crimes section, told Bloomberg. Uhlmann, who now teaches at the University of Michigan Law School, pointed out that after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, ExxonMobil (XOM) pleaded guilty to charges of that variety.

Another potential line of prosecutorial inquiry, and one that could have more severe effects on BP, would focus on whether executives lied in formal statements to the government. Depending on how high up the chain of command the probe went, a cover-up investigation could seal the fate of Chief Executive Tony Hayward and underscore questions about BP remaining independent. The company has said it will cooperate with investigators.

White House in Control?

While the FBI explores the nuances of pollution law, the White House promises daily to stem damage to the Gulf coastline and economy. "I'm confident people are going to look back and say this Administration was on top of what was an unprecedented crisis," Obama has told reporters. That seems increasingly doubtful. However the destructive gusher is stopped, Obama will have been the man in charge when we all realized that the White House isn't "on top of" much of anything when it comes to deep-sea oil.

The federal government that Obama inherited in 2009 had been more or less uninterested in keeping up with business over the course of three decades. "Industry has developed technology the government doesn't understand," says Richard B. Stewart, a professor of environmental law at New York University Law School.

As happened in the wake of the collapse of some of Wall Street's most storied investment banks, we are already beginning to learn that BP's internal communications show a reluctance to address what should have been dire warning signs. BP e-mail obtained by the House Energy Committee reveal that anxiety about the safety and soundness of the BP well was intensifying more than a month before the Apr. 20 blowout. This evidence, while fragmentary and inconclusive, may cast doubt on BP's contention after the explosion that the company was caught entirely by surprise.

A Mar. 10 e-mail from BP executive Scherie Douglas to Frank Patton, an MMS drilling engineer, said the company planned to sever the pipe connecting the well to the rig and then plug the hole. "We are in the midst of a well control situation on MC 252 #001 and we have stuck pipe," Douglas wrote, referring to the subsea area Mississippi Canyon 252. "We are bringing out equipment to begin operations to sever the drillpipe, plugback the well and bypass." BP received verbal approval from an unnamed MMS official at 11 p.m. on Mar. 11 to insert a cement plug at a shallower depth than normally would have been required after the hole caved in on the drilling equipment, the e-mail showed. Asked about these exchanges, a company spokesman said: "We have always said it was a complex accident. We await a full report."

The Myth of Industry Infallibility

As investigators reconstruct events leading up to Apr. 20, Sarah S. Elkind, an historian of politics and the environment at San Diego State University, warns against focusing on minutiae to the exclusion of the big picture. Within the MMS, she says, "The employees followed cues from political appointees during the Bush Administration and earlier Administrations, going back to 1980, and including Democrats as well as Republicans. The message was that government doesn't work, and industry always knows what it's doing. What did we expect the employees to do?"

Industry, of course, doesn't always know what it's doing, NYU's Stewart notes. He headed the Justice Dept.'s environmental division in March 1989, when the Exxon Valdez dumped 250,000 barrels of crude into Alaska's Prince William Sound. For 21 years, until BP, that was the record U.S. oil spill. After the Valdez ran aground, it became clear that the industry lacked the plans or equipment to contain a spill of that magnitude, Stewart says. "Government had delegated most cleanup responsibility to the oil companies, and their response capability was in mothballs."

Congress responded belatedly with legislation in 1990 that required safer supertankers and a mechanism for the U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies to coordinate a cleanup—on the water's surface. That didn't help prepare for a blowout a mile below. Once again, government had deferred to the oil industry, and the giant company in question wasn't ready for a monumental snafu.

Obama has spoken expansively about restoring respect for government service. His occasionally populist rhetoric aside, he has been solicitous of corporate interests, too. Recall the astonishing bailout of General Motors. Just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, the President had proposed expanding offshore oil exploration, in part as a bid for Republican votes for stalled energy and climate legislation. At the time, Obama praised advances in drilling technology.

"Where I was wrong," he said on May 27, "was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios." By his own admission, this product of Harvard Law School and liberal South Side Chicago politics was mesmerized, along with everyone else, by the myth of industry omnipotence.

Interior Dept. Lapses

The President also acknowledged that his Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, who oversees the MMS, hadn't moved quickly enough to root out favoritism and laxity. In 2009, BP was granted a "categorical exclusion" that allowed the Deepwater Horizon to operate without analysis required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Obama said changes had been planned at Interior. "If they were happening fast enough, [BP's safety glitches] might have been caught."

In congressional testimony, Salazar has blamed the environmental lapse on a statutory 30-day deadline on the permitting process. The Administration says it will seek to extend that time limit to 90 days. Salazar exacerbated his department's bumbling image by repeatedly boasting about having a "boot on the neck" of BP. He even suggested that the company would be pushed "out of the way" if it didn't move faster. The tough-guy talk wasn't convincing. The government lacks the necessary engineers, undersea robots, and scientific expertise. This remains BP's show.

The director of the MMS is gone, and the agency has been divided in three, so that its collection of oil royalties won't undermine its policing function. Obama has imposed a six-month moratorium on new permits for deepwater wells. The sale of exploration leases in the Gulf of Mexico and off Virginia has been suspended. A big Arctic energy project will be delayed. The government will require tougher certification of the sort of equipment—the notorious "blowout preventer"—that failed on the Deepwater Horizon.

That's not stopping some Republicans from equating Obama's response to the crisis to President George W. Bush's lack of urgency in reacting to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is running a Web video juxtaposing candidate Obama's words about Katrina—"Never again"—with those of liberal commentators castigating him for acting "lackadaisical" about the Gulf crisis and seeming as ineffective as "a Vatican observer."

More measured critics recognize that neither party has covered itself with glory. "The truth of the matter is nobody knows how to fix this damned thing," Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, told reporters, "and if they know how, they need to step up."

The Case for Better Regulation

Until someone figures out how to fix BP's leak, the idea the President should stress is how to reframe the debate about oil, investment banking, and other technologically sophisticated industries. Obama should argue that we need better government oversight of business, not to harm it, but to nurture it. He could invoke the memory of the New Deal regulatory revolution, which shielded industry and finance from calls for socialism after the Great Depression.

He won't win over Tea Partiers who see the New Deal (and the income tax and civil rights laws) as constitutional infringements. But a majority in America may well be receptive to an appeal that Democratic pollster Douglas E. Schoen described this way in a roundtable on the politics of the spill on washingtonpost.com: "We are all in this together—not as corporations or populists, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans working to solve the problem collectively." In a speech in Pittsburgh on the afternoon of June 2, Obama started in this direction, then swerved toward partisanship. The Republican agenda, he said, "basically offers two answers to every problem we face: more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations."

For the foreseeable future, we need an oil industry. It should be one that worries about tough inspections so it avoids another Deepwater Horizon. For the longer term, as Obama argued in Pittsburgh, we need a comprehensive climate and energy bill that will create incentives to find alternatives to oil retrieved at great expense from the ocean depths or purchased from pernicious foreign sources.

In the same spirit, pending financial reform legislation aims to insulate Wall Street from its worst instincts and make it less of a threat to the rest of us. Bills waiting to be reconciled by the House and Senate would give regulators more authority to monitor complex securities, simple mortgages, and all manner of transactions in between. Financial firms would come under pressure to reduce debt and hold more capital in reserve. If a financial outfit began to fail, regulators would have more tools to disassemble it before a traumatic collapse.

Obama ran for President emphasizing results. Businesspeople like to talk about results, too. After a generation of operating according to a simplistic notion that defined government oversight as essentially poisonous to corporate success, now would be an opportune time to rally the country around an ideal of tough, fair regulation for the good of business and the customers it serves.

Barrett is an assistant managing editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. With reporting by Stanley Reed, Brian Swint, Joe Carroll, Jim Efstathiou Jr., and Justin Blum.

Jun 1, 2010

Obama administration moves to distance itself from BP on oil spill response

Image via Wikipedia

By Joel Achenbach and Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010; A01

Struggling to convey command of the worsening Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Obama administration is taking steps to distance itself from BP and is dispatching Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to the Gulf Coast to meet with federal and state prosecutors. The Holder trip could signal that the environmental calamity might become the subject of a criminal investigation.

Holder has said Justice Department lawyers are examining whether there was any "malfeasance" related to the leaking oil well, and investigators, who have already been on the coast for a month, have sent letters to BP instructing the company to preserve internal records related to the spill. But federal officials indicated that Holder's trip, which will include a news conference in New Orleans on Tuesday afternoon, will focus on enforcement of environmental laws and holding BP accountable.

The opening of a criminal investigation or civil action against BP, if either were to happen, would create the unusual situation of the federal government weighing charges against a company that it is simultaneously depending on for the most critical elements of the response to the record oil spill.

"We're cooperating fully with all inquiries, and we're doing everything we need to do and more in terms of preserving records," BP spokesman Andrew Gowers said Monday.

The relationship between the federal government and the oil company has been an awkward collaboration all along -- "We have them by the neck," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said of BP in congressional testimony last week -- but it reached a turning point Monday when the administration said it no longer wants to share a podium with BP at the daily briefing in Louisiana. Instead, the national incident commander, Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, will give a solo briefing wherever he happens to be.

The public relations shake-up comes in a tense period, with the Gulf Coast rattled by news that last week's attempted "top kill" of the well didn't work. A government forecast shows the oil slick potentially striking the popular tourist beaches of Mississippi and Alabama later this week. The official arrival of hurricane season Tuesday has incited a new rash of dire scenarios. With bad news washing up everywhere, the administration has been desperate to convince the public that the government, and not the oil company, is fully in charge of the crisis and mounting a robust response.

The administration and BP have disagreed over whether the company's next maneuver would cause a temporary increase in the flow of oil into the gulf. In the coming days, BP plans to saw off the top of the leaking riser pipe where it emerges from the blowout preventer that sits on the well. BP will then lower a containment dome, or cap, onto the riser in an attempt to capture the leaking oil.

White House official Carol M. Browner said Sunday that after the pipe is cut, about 20 percent more oil would probably escape before the new cap is in place. BP officials said that they think that is unlikely and that there might be no significant change in the flow.

"We've been increasingly frustrated with BP on matters of transparency," an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Monday. "We're not going to stand there while BP says there's not going to be any increase in flow rate when they cut the riser."

Said Gowers: "We've been very clear about the likelihood of increased flow, and we'll leave it at that."

The seat-of-the-pants nature of BP's effort to deal with the spill was driven home Monday night by the announcement of a new element of the latest containment strategy, this one using hoses deployed in the failed top kill maneuver to channel oil to a free-standing pipe and then onto surface ships. BP said the technique, which might not be ready until early July, would capture more oil and gas. Another change to the pipe near the surface would allow greater flexibility of operations during a hurricane.

Hovering over such squabbles is the bigger question of whose hands are on the wheel of response to the crisis, which began with the April 20 explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 people.

President Obama and his lieutenants have insisted that the government has full authority. Before BP attempted the top kill, for example, the federal government issued a statement saying it had given approval for the maneuver. Allen, the incident commander, has said that while BP is the "responsible" party, the federal government is "accountable" for the response and that there's no meaningful way for the government to assume greater authority.

But the daily news briefings have not always bolstered the government's stature as the commanding authority in the crisis. The briefings have been held at the Unified Area Command headquarters in a Shell Oil training facility in the town of Robert, La. The two principal briefers have been Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry and BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles.

Landry tended to give relatively upbeat remarks on the progress of the response and the dedication of those involved. "BP has brought a very, very good team," she said early in the crisis. She rarely delivered bad news. Saturday, after Suttles announced the crushing news that the top-kill effort had failed, Landry said she was disappointed, but she added, "We also want to assure you we've had a very, very aggressive response posture."

Suttles typically delivered the most detailed, urgent news of the day involving the efforts to plug the leak. Reporters directed most of their questions to him.

Now Landry has been rotated back to her position as 8th District commander "in order to focus solely on coordinated federal hurricane response planning and preparation efforts in the Gulf of Mexico," a government spokesman said. The new on-scene coordinator at the command center is Rear Adm. James A. Watson. White House officials said Monday that no one was unhappy with Landry, only with the arrangement in which the government and BP shared a microphone.

Staff writers Robert Barnes, Steven Mufson and Michael D. Shear contributed to this report.

May 31, 2010

Oil could spew until August, officials say

Video

Top Kill Fails; BP Trying other options

BP's 'top kill' operation has failed to plug the oil leak in the Gulf. The company is now planning to cut off the damaged riser from which the oil is leaking and cap it with a containment valve. (May 29)

By Steven Mufson and David S. Hilzenrath
Monday, May 31, 2010; A01

As BP readied its latest fallback plan to stop oil gushing from one of its wells in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration and the company warned that the crude could continue flowing until August, compounding threats to coastal wetlands, fisheries and beaches.

White House energy and climate adviser Carol M. Browner said Sunday that the oil spill was "probably the biggest environmental disaster we've ever faced in this country" and that "we are prepared for the worst." On the CBS show "Face the Nation," she said that the "American people need to know that it is possible we will have oil leaking from this well until August when the relief wells will be finished."

Those two wells, which BP began drilling early this month, are expected to intersect the damaged one and seal it near the reservoir far below the seafloor. The first has reached 7,000 feet below the seafloor, and the second has reached 3,500 feet below the floor, but progress gets slower the deeper the wells go. With the arrival of hurricane season Tuesday, the drilling could be slowed if the rigs need to be evacuated during storms.

The grim assessment came in the wake of the failure last week of BP's "top kill" effort to stop the flow of oil from the damaged well by shooting heavy drilling mud into the hole.

BP managing director Bob Dudley, who also made the rounds of Sunday-morning shows, said on ABC's "This Week" that "the next step is to make sure that we minimize the oil and pollution going into the gulf." He added: "The main thing now is to contain it."

BP plans to saw off a bent and broken pipe attached to the five-story tall blowout preventer that sits over the well. The company will then lower a new apparatus that would funnel oil and gas to vessels on the sea surface. But until the new apparatus is in place, cutting the riser pipe will temporarily increase the flow of oil into the sea by 10 to 20 percent, because the procedure will remove a section of pipe where a kink is limiting the flow, Browner said.

4th fallback plan so far

Dudley expressed optimism about the latest fallback plan -- the fourth so far -- saying on CBS, "With this, we think we can contain the majority of the oil and gas."

BP and the Obama administration were also trying to contain the rising tide of public frustration as the oil spill comes to the end of its messy sixth week.

Drilling experts said they feared that BP's effort last week to stop the flow of oil and gas with heavy drilling mud might have done further damage to the well and the blowout preventer, possibly complicating the next effort to capture the oil and gas and bring them to surface vessels.

Some drilling experts said that the "top kill" effort failed over the weekend because the force of the oil and gas pushing up from the reservoir 13,000 feet below the seafloor was so great that it had shoved most of the drilling mud through the blowout preventer and into the sea.

Tadeusz W. Patzek, chairman of petroleum and geosystems engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said it was the "equivalent of six or seven fire hoses blasting oil and gas up, while two fire hoses were used to blast the drilling mud down. They never stood much of a chance."

Sources at two companies involved with the well said that BP also discovered new damage inside the well below the seafloor and that, as a result, some of the drilling mud that was successfully forced into the well was going off to the side into rock formations.

"We discovered things that were broken in the sub-surface," said a BP official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He said that mud was making it "out to the side, into the formation." The official said he could not describe what was damaged in the well.

Documents released Sunday by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce point to problems BP was having drilling the Macondo well, although some of them date to 2009 when BP was using a different rig with different equipment. Some documents describe previously reported trouble BP was having controlling the well. The company later drilled a new well section, costing it more than $20 million.

The longer oil seeps out of the ground, the more politics are seeping into the public debate as people question why the oil industry and the government were so ill-prepared.

In an echo of the counting of days during the politically debilitating Iranian hostage crisis during President Jimmy Carter's administration, Jake Tapper on ABC introduced his program as "Day 41 of the Gulf oil spill."

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) said BP "made enormous mistakes and probably cut corners." Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," Vitter also said the federal government has failed in its response to the crisis, "particularly with the effort to protect our coast and our marsh."

Last week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) questioned the administration's reliance on BP's estimates of the volume of oil, which has been flowing into the gulf since a blowout set fire to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which sank, killing 11 people.

Browner conceded on CBS that "BP has a financial interest in these numbers" on the volume of the leak. "They will pay penalties at the end of the day, a per-barrel, per-day penalty," she said. But she said the latest, increased estimates of oil flowing from the well were produced by an independent government review panel.

"At the end of the day, the government tells BP what to do, and at the end of the day, we will hold BP accountable for all of this," she said.

She also sought to portray the administration as in charge and engaged. She said an administration "brain trust" led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu urged BP to stop adding pressure to the well through the top-kill maneuver because "things could happen that would make the situation worse."

But she stopped short on CBS of saying that Chu ordered an end to the top-kill maneuver.

Pressed to give an example of administration influence, Browner cited the drilling of two relief wells instead of one. A BP official said that it was "not unusual" to drill a second relief well and that it "very likely" would have been done anyway.

But Browner said that "BP said we're going to drill one relief well. These are expensive wells for them to drill. We said that's not good enough. You're going to drill a second one."

BP has said it would take responsibility for damage from the spill, but BP chief executive Tony Hayward on Sunday disputed claims by scientists that large undersea plumes have been set adrift by the gulf oil spill.

The Associated Press reported that during a tour of a company staging area for cleanup workers, Hayward said BP's samples showed "no evidence" that oil was suspended in large masses beneath the surface.

"The oil is on the surface," Hayward said. "Oil has a specific gravity that's about half that of water. It wants to get to the surface because of the difference in specific gravity."

Scientists from several universities have reported plumes of what appears to be oil suspended in clouds stretching for miles and reaching hundreds of feet beneath the gulf's surface.

May 28, 2010

Obama struggling to show he's in control of oil spill

Image by tsevis via Flickr

By Karen Tumulty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 28, 2010; A01

A defensive President Obama sought Thursday to quell doubts about his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, insisting that his administration has been "in charge" from the moment it began and bristling that critics who accuse it of being sluggish to react "don't know the facts."

But at times during a 63-minute news conference in the East Room of the White House, the president seemed to undercut his own argument. He enumerated a litany of fumbles and lapses: that the government lacks resources and "superior technology" to respond to the disaster; that he personally had assumed oil companies "had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios"; that his administration "fell short" with its acceptance of BP's inaccurate estimate of the size of the gusher; that reforms of the corruption-plagued government agency that oversees offshore drilling "weren't happening fast enough."

At one point, Obama said he did not know whether Elizabeth Birnbaum -- the director of the Minerals Management Service he blamed for allowing the oil industry to overrule environmental and safety concerns -- had resigned or been fired hours before.

The news conference marked a sharp departure in tone from the first days after an oil rig explosion caused the spill, when the White House seemed determined to fix the blame and keep the public outrage directed at the oil company involved. "In case you were wondering who's responsible, I take responsibility," Obama said Thursday. "It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down."

This is the familiar Obama: resolute and in charge. But six weeks after the spill began, those words seemed to highlight the difficulty he has had in convincing the country that he is on top of the situation. As oil continues to foul the gulf, the conflicting signals coming from the president and his team have imperiled his reputation for competence and coolness in the face of crisis.

Only three weeks before the explosion, Obama had proposed opening up 167 million acres to offshore oil exploration, as a means of finding more oil and more votes on Capitol Hill for comprehensive energy and climate legislation. In defending that plan, he had cited advances in drilling technology that he said made it significantly safer than it had been in the past.

White House aides say that as oil continued to spew from the floor of the gulf, the president -- who described himself as "angry and frustrated" -- privately expressed dismay about the faulty assurances he received from the oil industry that exploration was safe. "For so long, we didn't have accidents in the gulf, and we took the oil and gas industry maybe a little too much at their word," said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Obama announced new steps that he said would help "ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again." Deep and far-reaching reform will come, he promised, after a commission he is appointing finishes a six-month investigation of the causes of the April 20 explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon rig and measures that might have prevented it.

In the early weeks after the rig sank, polls showed the public saw a clear villain -- BP -- and approved of the administration's approach to the situation, which emphasized ensuring that the oil company would bear the cost of stopping the spill, cleaning it up and repairing the damage. Some in the White House were so confident of their ability to stay ahead of the crisis that they welcomed comparisons with George W. Bush's bungling of the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

But the latest surveys show that public confidence in Washington's handling of the spill has dropped sharply. And there has also been a fraying of what had begun as a relatively smooth working relationship among the government, BP, and state and local officials in the region. "The president has not been as visible as he should have been on this," Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told Politico, "and he's going to pay a political price for it, unfortunately."

Gulf Coast residents are furious; images of the oil's sheen on the water have given way to ones of black beaches and dead animals.

On cable news broadcasts of Obama's news conference, he had to share the screen with a live shot of that painfully familiar underwater pipe spitting out brown gunk.

Even as the president laid greater claim to the handling of the disaster, he distanced himself from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's frequent boast that the administration has a "boot on the neck" of BP.

"I think Ken Salazar would probably be the first one to admit that he has been frustrated, angry and occasionally emotional about this issue, like a lot of people have," Obama said. He added: "I would say that we don't need to use language like that."

Indeed, Obama seemed most sensitive to suggestions -- made with increasing frequency by such critics as Democratic strategist James Carville -- that the oil company is calling the shots.

BP is the "responsible party," with access to resources, technology and expertise that the government lacks, Obama said. But all its actions, he insisted, are done "under our supervision, and any major decision that they make has to be done under the approval of Thad Allen, the national incident coordinator."

Although he acknowledged that the government's performance before and since the spill began has been far from perfect, Obama insisted that it should not be faulted for lack of effort. "This has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred," he said, and later added, "We are relying on every resource and every idea, every expert and every bit of technology, to work to stop it."

Obama spoke of the toll the crisis has taken on him, an unusual turn for a president who is sometimes faulted for being too intellectual and aloof.

"This is what I wake up to in the morning, and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about," he said. He cannot escape questions about the spill, even at home. As he was shaving Thursday morning, he said, 11-year-old daughter, Malia, peeked in and asked, "Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?"

Staff writers Anne E. Kornblut and Scott Wilson contributed to this report.