THE Oil Spill

It's been a month and the undersea gusher continues. As the oil fouls everything seen and unseen, the anger grows at the destruction of not only wildlife and sensitive marshland and coastline, but of peoples' livelihoods. Now and for the foreseeable future.

What happened here wasn't a simple "oops" in a mechanical failure. According to all accounts, it was management exercising its usual "screw your rational judgment...do as I say at all possible costs" pressure on a drilling operation. The drilling crew knew the high potential that removal of the heavy drilling fluid would allow gas and oil to escape from the well. They also hoped the "pinchers" referring supposedly to the "blowout preventer" would work in the case of an emergency. As we know, it didn't. In the ensuing failure, 11 lives were lost and the worst ecological failure of an oil company property came to be.

Add to this debacle the missed inspections by the Minerals Management Service, the Federal agency that was supposed to safeguard lives and the environment on this and all oil rigs. 12 missed inspections out of 60 so we are told? Sounds like what happens in mines when MSHA doesn't do its job and a mine explodes killing numerous miners. They either inspect too infrequently, or cite the mines and allow the citations to be contested forever, while the safety violations go unabated! Then we have OSHA which allows some of the states to handle some of their inspections and I don't even want to go down that road with what I have witnessed personally.

Obama is making more trips to the Gulf region as the beaches become fouled and the summer tourist season gets into full swing. The jobs lost, the toll on the economy, the loss of livelihoods, damage and death to wildlife and wetlands will never be mitigated. He waited too long before jumping in with both feet and ordering the federal government to pour all necessary support into this catastrophe, without waiting to see if BP could solve its own problem.

Why don't we have a plan for such catastrophies? Why not have a warehouse full of oil eating microbes ready to ship out to places like this when disaster strikes? Why not have a pollution task force that can handle this? Where are the hundreds of oil skimmers and vacuum barges that should be descending on this from all over the globe? Like Katrina, this is a dollar short and a day late in execution by the government. Waiting until it's too late and hoping someone else will take care of it. Did contributions by big oil dull the response?

No, I'm not an environmental activist. I know we need the oil and energy, but we don't need to destroy out coastline and wildlife to do it. Nor do we need big oil to run the show while the most powerful government in the world sits on its hands wondering if this will turn out okay. Putting the Coast Guard in charge is fine except they have been hamstrung for decades with budget constraints on equipment. They should have had a fleet available for issues just such as this, if not their own, at their beck and call.

Watchful waiting is not the answer. Because, like some cancers, it grows beyond control and kills everything in its path before it can ever be stopped.