OPINION:
We were getting the lowest, not highest, estimates of the oil spill flow rate in the Deepwater Horizon disaster (“Obama’s ban on skimmers,” Comment & Analysis, July 12). The “official” estimate was 60,000 barrels a day. Since BP cut the 21-inch riser, we saw continuous video of oil gushing - and any engineer with a ruler can tell that the oil plume on the screen contains two barrels of oil. If those two barrels of oil move off-screen in a second, that’s about 180,000 barrels a day. Moving off in half a second doubles the amount.
Bureaucratic inaction can only prevent right-sized skimming if the president doesn’t have the knowledge to act. President Obama should have surrounded himself with enough engineers to explain how killing a deepwater well takes time and how minimizing the oil’s ecological and economic damage to the Gulf requires the ability to skim off at least as much oil as is spilling.
For three months, he had the opportunity to override the Jones Act and the Environmental Protection Agency’s irrelevant rules. He should have acted sooner.
GEORGE F. STEEG
Potomac Falls, Va.
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