Obama refuses Dutch help for the Gulf Crisis

pineinthegrass wrote:

The Viking wrote:

pineinthegrass wrote: Here's what Adm. Thad Allen had to say about the skimmers...

http://www.piersystem.com/go/doc/2931/627127/

Q: There are many people who say that the best dredgers and skimmers in the world come from countries like the Netherlands and France and that they can't—they're not being asked to come in because of the Jones Act. Is that the case? And why not get around that, suspend that, so you can bring that other you know technology in?

ADMIRAL ALLEN: Well, first of all, those are source countries. That's correct, they're available. But we are using them. We are dealing with folks like Norway, the Netherlands, Canada and other places. Anyplace that's got skimming capability that's available, we're willing to talk to them, and we actually have, in some cases, actually transferred the equipment down and will continue to do that.

If it gets—if it gets to the point where there's a Jones Act required, we're willing to do that, too. Nobody's come to me with a request for a Jones Act waiver, but any skimming capability we can bring in, we're looking for.

Q: So are the actual boats being brought in or just the equipment?

ADMIRAL ALLEN: Well, in some cases it's the skimmer itself. In some cases, the skimming equipment is organic to the vessel itself. It depends on what you're talking about. To my knowledge, what we brought in is actually skimming equipment rather than the vessels themselves, but we can give you a detailed listing.

Yes, so some of the best and most sophisticated vessels for this type of disator are offered along with the crews who know how to use them. Instead we turn them down for weeks and now we finally have accepted some of their equiptment but not the vessels becaue unions don't want that. And then our people had to be trained how to use them before they could use them. And we don't have nearly as many as we could be using. Why? It cost us over a month of cleaning up which was a month of it drifting onto our shores. And still we should be taking on 20-30 more vessels to get a handle on this. Why aren't we?

Do you have any source for this info? That's what I find difficult, to find a timeline of when we did get the skimmers, how effective they are, and are we not getting enough? I can't blame the administration for not acting in the first 3 days based on the info available at the time (other than in hindsight). But I can blame them if they didn't act in getting needed equipment after the problem was well understood.

OK, here is a great link. Read the statistics and then you will see why I am so upset that we have an inexperienced indecisive President in the White House. This story states that it took over 7 weeks to get our ships outfitted with the skmmers and start the clean up.

http://blogs.ajc.com/kyle-wingfield/201 ... -go-dutch/

Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.

It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.

The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.

U.S. ships are being outfitted this week with four pairs of the skimming booms airlifted from the Netherlands and should be deployed within days. Each pair can process 5 million gallons of water a day, removing 20,000 tons of oil and sludge.

At that rate, how much more oil could have been removed from the Gulf during the past month?

Presumably, Steffy asked that last question rhetorically. But the answer — 20,000 tons a day times 30 days — is 600,000 tons, or about 4.4 million barrels of oil according to this conversion calculator. Given the new, upwardly revised estimate of 100,000 barrels leaking each day, roughly 5 million barrels may have entered the Gulf since the leak began April 20.

That’s back-of-the-envelope math, to be sure, but it’s clear that the Dutch were offering some major help. So why did we refuse it? Steffy describes one reason:


Bottom line is that had Obama swallowed his pride and waived the Jones Act like Bush did, we had a chance at containing the majority of this spill had he been a President that actually knew how ot act rather than delegate and form committees. So according to this story, the wetlands, the majority of wildlife and most of the economy and industries destroyed down there could have been prevented with one word. When the Dutch and others who are experts at cleaning this up asked if we wanted their help, all he had to do was say YES!

We could have contained up to 4,4 million of the 5 million barrels spilled. What I heard recently is that we are cleaning up about 10- 40,000 barrels a day depending upon who you believe. It will take forever to clean it up at that rate and we will never catch up and it will continue to destroy that region for decades. His indecisiveness and him telling other nations that we don't want help is what caused the most damage in this disastor.

Was BP at fault? Of course! But could a strong and decisive President mitigated the damage to a huge degree? Absolutely! A committee organizer and delegator should not be running this country and cannot handle a crisis. I am going to say something I never thought I would say. I wish Hillary would have beat him in the primary and become President. I think she would have at least been decisive enough to have pervented a majority of the damage to our gulf coast. Obama's inexperience just destroyed a good part of our gulf coast for decades to come.