Battle for boom became political after Gulf oil spill, officials say

By Jonathan Tilove
Published: Wednesday, January 19, 2011, 12:34 PM

WASHINGTON — Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, agreed Wednesday that the politics of boom overrode the logic of response during the effort to contain and clean up the BP oil spill. Allen, who was the National Incident Commander during the spill, said it got to the point that “self-worth was being measured by how much boom was in each state.” Allen said that at that point, the deployment of the boom was being dictated not by legitimate response criteria, “but politics.” In the end, McNutt said, booming,and skimming, which captured much of the public attention in the wake of the spill, had a relatively small impact on actually retrieving spilled oil. “I think something like three percent of the oil was actually collected by skimming and another five percent maybe by burning and booming,” said McNutt. “A lot of the boom was deployed to areas where it wasn’t yet needed.” … The cautions by Allen and McNutt echo the narrative of the final report of the National Oil Spill Commission, which offered a critical view of the political commotion around and competition for boom among states and parishes. The Federal Interagency Solutions Group, established at the behest of the Coast Guard, concluded in November that about 17 percent of the oil was directly recovered, five percent was burned, three percent was skimmed, 16 percent was chemically dispersed, 13 percent was naturally dispersed, and 23 percent evaporated or dissolved. There was no discrete category for the amount of oil recovered by boom. …

Battle for boom became political after Gulf oil spill, officials say