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Oil Spill: Obama’s Category 5 Disaster

America maintains an enormous federal government specifically to imagine the worst and then plan for it. As the oil spill makes clear, we must face the prospect that such plans and protection are nothing more than a very expensive illusion.

“The White House has again reacted with little visible urgency, but so have the agencies actually capable of helping. That’s bad, but it gets worse.

“If Washington cannot respond to an oil spill’s relatively uncomplicated and predictable devastation, what will happen to the city visited by a nuclear or biological attack? Our leaders tell us to expect such an attack soon. But everyone knew, too, that an oil spill would one day destroy parts of the Gulf Coast. The question now is why we didn’t do something about it.”

If those words sound familiar, it’s because we wrote most of them in 2005. We substituted oil spill for Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast for New Orleans. The result explains why America has grown so frustrated with the White House’s inability to see the current disaster until it washed up on Louisiana’s beaches.

The human devastation of Katrina was far worse than what will result from the Deepwater Horizon explosion. But the disasters are too nearly equal in what they have exposed about the limits of our government to deal with what it is supposed to deal with.

The administration of President George W. Bush failed both in perceiving the disaster created by Hurricane Katrina and in reacting with the urgency it demanded, especially when local government proved so incapable. The results were catastrophic to New Orleans and to the culture of the city.

The administration of President Barack Obama failed both in perceiving the disaster caused by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and in reacting with urgency it demanded, especially when BP prov ed so incapable. The results are catastrophic to the Gulf of Mexico and to the culture and wildlife surrounding it.

Both administrations have said they received bad counsel – from folks closer to the disasters and from the first federal officials to react. In neither case is that close to an adequate explanation for leaving a disaster in such inept hands for so long.

Neither does it explain why the Bush administration – and presidents before him – ignored warnings about the inadequacy of the levees protecting New Orleans. Or why Obama – and presidents before him – ignored warnings about offshore drilling.

In fact, until the moment the Deepwater Horizon exploded, leading to one of the nation’s biggest oil spills, the Obama administration was intent on opening even more of the nation’s offshore territory to drilling. Now the administration is intent only on postponing that ill-advised move while thousands of barrels spew ever closer to fragile wetlands.

For days in September 2005, the governments of New Orleans and Louisiana tried to deal with the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. They failed.

For more than a month now, BP has been trying to contain its disaster. It has failed. Even if the current effort to staunch the flow is successful, many millions of gallons of oil have already spilled.

In answer to that, the Obama White House has grown more vocal in its criticism of the oil company. What it hasn’t done is what it should have done a month ago: Take control.