FOR MORE than an hour yesterday US president Barack Obama struggled to convince the American people that his administration was fully in charge of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
But the president’s assurances, at a White House press conference, were undermined by new government estimates showing the spill was more than twice as bad as had been thought.
Mr Obama admitted he had trusted BP more than he should have. “Where I was wrong was in believing that oil companies had their act together,” he said.
Mr Obama claimed he did not know the circumstances of the resignation earlier in the day of Elizabeth Birnbaum, head of the minerals management service (MMS), which is supposed to regulate the oil industry.
US networks broadcast Mr Obama’s image alongside the “spillcam” showing oil spewing from a broken pipe, even as BP continued its efforts to plug the well with a “top kill” of dense drilling mud. The results of the operation were not yet known and Mr Obama noted that it offered no guarantee of success.
The president said the disaster “is what I wake up to in the morning and what I go to bed at night thinking about”.
He said his young daughter Mahlia had knocked on the bathroom door as he was shaving yesterday morning and asked him, “Did you plug the hole yet Daddy?”
Government scientists announced yesterday that the oil well was gushing between 12,000 barrels and 19,000 barrels per day, more than twice the previous estimate.
This means it has now leaked between 17 million and 39 million gallons, compared to 11 million gallons in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.
“People should know that from the moment this disaster began, the federal government has been in charge,” Mr Obama told the press conference.
“BP is responsible for this disaster and we will hold them accountable. We will demand they pay every dime for the damage they’ve done.”
The president announced he was suspending oil exploration in two regions off the coast of Alaska, and off the coast of Virginia and Georgia. Work on 33 deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico is to be suspended for six months.
“This notion that we are sitting on the sidelines and letting BP make the decisions is not true,” the president said. For example, BP wanted to drill only one relief well; he insisted they drill two. The problem was that BP’s technology was superior to the government’s.
Americans are judging the Obama administration on results, not effort. They do not understand why, more than five weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank, the well is still gushing oil, 100 miles of Louisiana coastline have been spoiled and more than 400 birds have been found dead.
Mr Obama said a report by the inspector general of the department of the interior about the MMS, which was released this week, was “appalling”. He seemed to blame the previous administration, saying that interior secretary Ken Salazar “found the MMS had been plagued by corruption for years” and that the oil industry maintained “a scandalously close relationship” with its regulator.
“More than anything else, this economic and environmental tragedy underscores the need for this nation to develop clean, renewable sources of energy,” Mr Obama said. Domestic oil production was necessary, but it was “insufficient to meet the needs of the future”.
The fact that oil companies have to go a mile under water and then drill another three miles beyond that showed how depleted domestic supplies had become, Mr Obama said.
“That’s the reason you never heard me say ‘drill, baby, drill’. We cannot drill our way out of the problem. The easily accessible oil has already been sucked up out of the ground.”