Just DO It
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says the state is not waiting for federal approval to begin building sand barriers to protect the coastline from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Dear God. There is no excuse for what is going on.
NO excuse.
As someone pointed out so succinctly Thursday (Marco Rubio, matter of fact) ~ we don’t own the Gulf. If we’re not out there, drilling as safely as we possibly can, you can damn well bet your ass someone else is gonna be. And it’s gonna be China, or Venezuela, or Cuba, Russia…who knows who. But if it’s NOT us, it could be anybody, so NOT drilling’s NOT an option for our own best defense and our own best interest, both environmentally AND energy independence.
The problem’s not the drilling.
The problem is that the saying “shit happens” didn’t come into being because shit doesn’t happen, but because it ALWAYS happens. ALWAYS. And we’ve all been there and all said it and all cleaned shit up. Which is why you plan for it, why you have seven different ways to fix the twelve different things that might go to shit and know at least eighteen different people who have an idea what to do if you do. Why you use an exponent for expertise depending on the difficulty/level of possible public embarrassment/natural disaster involved in the project at hand. For instance, at the squadron, we did it for everything from an accidental discharge of plane washing fluid into a drain, to some dipshit hitting a fuel release switch and gazillions of gallons of JP-5 (jetfuel) spraying Caesar’s Palace fountains’ like onto the taxiway. Different levels of reaction, response and “Holy Shit!” phone calls to the appropriate people, but you swung into action immediately. Knew where the things and people were that you needed to FIX it.
For all the holes in the ground that never ever burped a problem, they HAD to know one day shit was gonna happen that would cause all those decades of happy drilling to pale instantly into pasty insignificance. So it has. The sickening result, besides the rusty, gloppy, gelatinous goo poisoning my beautiful water, is watching the utter and complete incompetence of both the technological geniuses responsible for the deepest, safest rig ever and the piteous intellectual giants who replaced poor, inept, weepy eyed “Brownie” in case we had some sort of national emergency. All of whom, mind you, are headed our way yet again…to…um…clean a pelican. Or something.
Fuck, I don’t know.
And the problem is, NEITHER DO THEY.
And, in the meantime, Robert “I Know Greasy” Gibbs can snark that Sarah Palin should educate herself about the OIL INDUSTRY (!) to Bob Schieffer , but sure can’t tell anyone why they haven’t done a damn thing about those BP (you know, those guys that gave OBAMA more money than ANYBODY ELSE) rigs that are pretty much carbon copies of this one. Or WHY they haven’t pulled the best oil INDUSTRY- Red Adair-deep sea rig kinda brains in the WHOLE FRICKIN’ world in to live on a barge over this thing and said
“Diver Dan the disaster 24/7 until you fix it!”
Oh, no. They brought in NASA. NASA?!?!?!?! (Isn’t that, like, THE WRONG DIRECTION?)
Classic.
The rocket scientists those other people elected…brought in…rocket scientists.
Maybe if someone in this administration had ever actually held a REAL JOB they might know someone to call who’d actually held a REAL WRENCH, instead of just…well…been a REAL TOOL.
Biz, Nanny State, People, Politics | tree hugging sister | 
May 23, 2010 8:07 pm
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Sis, the Federal goobermint is supposed to have loads of contingency plans for just about any incident you can imagine within the territories of the United Sates, from national planning scenarios to locally identified hazards. And supposedly they have had ’em for years and years.
*IF* you believe the hock and hooey about “preparedness”, that is. Speaking from personal and professional experience, my advice is: don’t believe a word of it. If you already don’t, you’re ahead of the game.
In point of fact, most of those contingency “plans” are lists of resources: contractors, supplies, goobermint employees who are “subject matter experts”, some basic response organizations, etc. What most of them really plan to do is follow the OODA loop: “Observe, Orient, Decide, Act”. Detailed (and realistic!) contingency plans for specific scenarios are fairly rare.
Well, the Feds have “Observe” down pat. It’s the “Orient” and “Decide” part where they falter. Naturally, “Act” seldom happens. And if they do act, it’s usually a ham handed strategy.
Different levels of reaction, response and “Holy Shit!” phone calls to the appropriate people, but you swung into action immediately. Knew where the things and people were that you needed to FIX it.
That’s the way to do it. PERIOD. Unfortunately, the Federal bureaucrats have been sucking more and more the decision making back east, to inside the Beltway. Where a lot of it becomes political maneuvering for control of funding and prestige.
It’s enough to make me puke.
I’m truly terrified of a truly catastrophic disaster in this country. Katrina was just a wake up call. The BP oil spill is the snooze alarm going off.
Seems Mighty O’s answer to this, as floated this morning by his energy commisar, is to nationalize the oil industry.
Even better news: He says demanding higher fuel economy and more pollution control on trucks will lower shipping costs.
Try as I may to make this shit up, I just can’t.
I see the same thing in Australia. We get some moron in a suit standing up and waving a stack of paper and shouting “We have a disaster plan.”
They don’t. What they have is a piece of paper covered with bureauracratese that is unintelligible, and gets used to sit coffee on when the disaster plan is needed. And everyone else just uses their common bloody sense to solve the problem.