The world is watching in disbelief as we blunder through the oil spill cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico. Lawrence Solomon’s “Avertible Catastrophe” in the Canadian publication Financial Post, describes the most ridiculous kind of bureaucratic inflexibility imaginable in the reasons used to reject effective technology and help from the Netherlands and other countries in cleaning up the spill and protecting the Gulf Coast.
“Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.”………..
“Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.”
In Solomon’s article there are more disheartening details of well intentioned bureacrats turning the accident in the gulf into a far worse disaster than it should have become.
“According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work. “Given the fact that there is so much oil on a daily basis coming in, you do not have that much time to protect the marshlands,” he says, perplexed that the U.S. government could be so focussed on side issues with the entire Gulf Coast hanging in the balance.”
As Logan Penza suggests at The Moderate Voice: “Seriously, You can’t make this stuff up”
Yet some folks still wonder why Americans are increasingly skeptical of ever expanding bureaucratic regulatory solutions and their inevitable unintended consequences.
Well, you could make this up.
Republican and right wing pundits (including Sarah Palin) blamed Obama for not waiving the Jones Act that prohibits foreign-flagged ships from serving US ports, and then others started blaming the EPA (though the apparently forbidden Dutch skimmers are now hard at work in the Gulf).
But the LA Times, the Huffington Post and FactCheck.org have all corroborated that the US is accepting help from 12 foreign countries. The State Department claims they’ve turned down only one offer, from France for a banned dispersant.
So why is NESEA propagating this nonsense without adequate fact-checking?
Robert,
I would be very glad to learn that I was wrong in linking to that article in the Financial Post and that the delays in utilizing effective technology solutions to clean up the Gulf spill, which Mr. Solomon noted, in fact never happened.
Please forward links to the sources you note.
Fred Unger
Robert,
In fact checking as you requested, I found this Christian Science Monitor article:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0701/Top-five-bottlenecks-in-the-Gulf-oil-spill-response
It suggests that: “Three days after the accident, the Dutch government offered advanced skimming equipment capable of sucking up oiled water, separating out most of the oil, and returning the cleaner water to the Gulf. But citing discharge regulations that demand that 99.9985 percent of the returned water is oil-free, the EPA initially turned down the offer. A month into the crisis, the EPA backed off those regulations, and the Dutch equipment was airlifted to the Gulf.”
Checking at several sources, it appears that it was mid-June before the European skimmers were allowed to participate in the cleanup.
The European solution is skimming oil contaminated water, extracting the vast majority of the oil and then discharging the same water back into the gulf. They get out 99% of the oil. Doesn’t it make far more sense to have skimmers store only oil on board and keep skimming, rather than collect a mixture of 90% water and 10% oil, have to make 10 times as many trips to port, and then have to store and separate that massive volume of oil contaminated water on land?
Clearly having tough discharge rules for polluters is appropriate. But in a case like oil spill cleanup skimmers, why should the EPA regulations require that skimmers can only discharge water at 15 parts per million oil? Shouldn’t the goal be to collect as much spilled oil as quickly as possible before it contaminates wildlife, fisheries, marine environments, beaches and sensitive wetland ecosystems? Why did it take over a month to waive that 15 ppm regulation in an instance like this where the source of the discharge is cleaning the water, not contaminating it? Why would rules like that ever exist for clean up technology like skimmers in the first place? They simply defy common sense.
Rather than the political dispute that you seem to want to turn it into, this seems to be a matter of mindless regulations requiring ideals of perfection to prevent good and effective results. Folks on both the left and right side of the political spectrum have been guilty of that kind of foolish regulation.