Leadership and Crisis (3 page)

Because of his frustration with the federal response, Mayor David Camardelle of Grand Isle pushed a plan to place rocks (temporarily) in western Barataria Bay to protect some of the most sensitive and productive fishing estuaries in the world. The idea was to narrow the passes and use vacuum barges in the gaps to fight the oil from getting to our interior marshes. This defense would be especially important when the boom and skimmers were rendered ineffective by storm surges. To implement his plan, Camardelle needed the approval of the federal government. The president promised that he would get a call within hours about the plan. Weeks later they were still telling us to wait. The mayor was repeatedly told that his plan was on the verge of getting approved, so he actually had BP go buy and move the rocks.
It wasn’t until July 6—weeks later—that we got an answer. It was no. And they offered no real alternative solutions.

I will let the experts debate whether the plan was a good one or not. But the fact that they took forever to give him an answer and encouraged him to believe that the plan would be approved was ridiculous.

It was enormously frustrating, and it was becoming a pattern. The federal government didn’t have an adequate plan, but kept stopping us from acting. Every time one of our requested defense measures was not provided by the federal government, we came up with an alternative—just to have those alternatives get shot down.

The federal government seemed often more concerned about process than results. The vacuum barges were working very well, but on June 17 I had to go to Delta Marina in Plaquemines Parish to check on the barges which had been shut down by the Coast Guard because they needed “inspections and certifications.” There was heavy oil impact in Barataria Bay where vacuum operations had been working before these “inspections.” These barges had literally suctioned thousands of gallons of oil out of the marshes. Now, the federal government wanted to make sure that the barges were using the proper valves. We asked why the valves were so important. They explained that using the wrong valves might cause a little of the oil they were sucking up to drop BACK into the water! Timmy interrupted the meeting and said, “Wait a minute, you are concerned about the environmental impacts of a fraction of the oil these barges remove from the water seeping back in?” I would have laughed harder about the silliness of it all, but the stakes were too high. I demanded that the White House show a sense of urgency in getting these barges back to work, and was therefore furious to learn that the Coast Guard wasted several hours since they couldn’t find phone numbers for the barge
companies. They didn’t realize that they and BP had approved each of the contractors; the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. Apparently they eventually realized the absurdity of the situation, but then they wanted the barges to
return to port
so they could count the lifejackets and fire extinguishers. We pleaded with them to allow the barges to work during the inspections, to have the inspectors
go to them
, but the feds refused. (I guess it made too much sense.) After bringing the barges back to port for twenty-four hours, they eventually allowed them to resume work without inspections.

Perhaps the most iconic image of the oil spill was the workers, dressed in white Hazmat suits, wandering the coastline. But these workers were far less effective than they might have been because of federal regulations. When temperatures rose above 90 degrees (which they do approximately
every day
in Louisiana during the summer), workers were allowed to labor for only a fraction of an hour. News crews regularly caught them working for less than twenty minutes and then resting for the remainder of the hour under white tents that had been erected on the beaches. What is so frustrating about this is that at the same time the National Guard, employees of Louisiana’s Wildlife and Fisheries, and private contractors were working for eight to twelve hours every day, some with bulldozers and shovels. They got what the feds still didn’t: we were at war. You literally couldn’t have pulled these guys off their jobs to sit in tents. Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts got it right when he told a local reporter that it was time for the feds to get a war mentality to tackle the oil spill. “Katrina would be a perfect example of that. Another example is the war going on in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s hot, they’re on the sand, but soldiers don’t fight for ten minutes then say, ‘Timeout, we have to take our required OSHA break.’ It’s ridiculous.”
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In another instance, we were building sand berms out by the Chandeleur Islands. The project had been approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, and we had started dredging. But we were told by the Interior Department that we were dredging in the wrong spot. They were wrong, and eventually we went public and suggested that the Department of the Interior needed to consult a map to see we were dredging within the area they approved. We even offered to replace the sand we were temporarily using—but they refused. Work began once again, but we lost precious time when they forced us to move equipment. Dredging had been shut down for almost a week because of the bureaucrats.

Our problems in Louisiana were compounded by the fact that the Obama administration imposed a deepwater offshore drilling moratorium. Along the Louisiana coast fishermen and the energy industry have a long history of coexisting very well together. For example, in Morgan City for the past seventy-five years we’ve held a Shrimp and Petroleum Festival. When President Obama announced a moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling, it was devastating news for our state. Depending on its length, the moratorium risked killing thousands of jobs and resulting in a loss of millions in wages each month. The moratorium would do nothing to clean up the Gulf of Mexico, but it could have a severe impact on our economy. Just as the threat of expanding cap and trade, higher tax rates, and the cost of health care reform are causing businesses to refrain from investing and creating jobs, the administration appeared oblivious to the impact their actions would have on private sector jobs. The companies would likely absorb the losses and try to maintain their staffs and equipment if they were assured the moratorium would be short-lived, and indeed many are
trying to do just that. Businesses need predictability when making massive investments of capital. The moratorium did the opposite.

When it came to the moratorium, there seemed to be a disconnect between the White House and reality. As of this writing, the courts have ruled twice against the administration, with one judge even calling their actions “arbitrary” and “capricious.” The judge said that the government’s action “does not seem to be fact-specific” and that the “government’s hair-splitting explanation abuses reason and common sense.” When another judge asked the lawyers for the federal government whether they “considered the severe economic harm that befalls the oil industry and the workers in the oil industry as a result of the six-month moratorium,” the answer came back: NO.
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We had regular daily talks with the White House, and it was usually Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to the president, who participated. When the president first announced a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf, I mentioned to Jarrett on the phone how the moratorium could cost Louisiana thousands of jobs. Jarrett said that no, the effects would not be long lasting because there was a lot of oil under the Gulf and the oil rigs weren’t going anywhere. “There will be oil there tomorrow,” she told us. Senator Mary Landrieu and I had to explain to her that some of the rigs rent at $500,000 a day, and that an unpredictable moratorium could alter companies’ long-term plans. If they couldn’t pump oil and were sitting idle for at least six months, the rigs would simply be moved to another location. (And indeed, some of the oil rigs have been redeployed to Africa as of this writing.) Jarrett didn’t seem to understand that the rigs couldn’t be turned on and off with a switch—and that global competition for the production of oil is very real. The idea that she could so confidently predict the economic
impact of the drilling moratorium and not actually realize that oil rigs would simply be moved was stunning.
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Along with the official moratorium on deep-water drilling, independent oil operators began to complain that the Obama administration had a de facto moratorium in place on shallow-water drilling. Before the spill, federal authorities were regularly issuing permits to drill in shallow water. After the spill, the issuing of permits was reduced to a trickle. Most of these shallow-water operators were not a part of “big oil”—they were small, independent producers who could lose everything. Their operations in, say, 200 feet of water had nothing to do with what happened at Deepwater Horizon. But a de facto moratorium was imposed.

The White House certainly knew that the moratorium could cost thousands of jobs. And they went ahead anyway.
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When I raised my concerns about the moratorium with President Obama, he assumed that I was simply parroting these words because I was supposed to say them. “I understand you need to say all of this, I know you need to say this, that you are facing political pressure,” he said. He didn’t seem to understand that for us in Louisiana, this was the reality on the ground. This was about people losing their jobs. He responded by saying that national polls indicated that people supported a ban. The human element seemed invisible to the White House.

Why was the decision-making so bad? Were they blinded by ideology? Ideology may have played a part. But even more important (and more troubling) to me was the simple fact that the Obama administration was making big decisions about an industry they knew little about—and they didn’t seem particularly concerned about the consequences. For example, they touted the fact that they secured money from BP to compensate oil rig workers for their loss of pay as a result
of the moratorium. But they didn’t think about everyone else who would suffer, including suppliers, caterers, shop owners, and support personnel. They boldly went about making major decisions without really understanding the consequences of what they were doing.

The Obama administration tried to cloak the moratorium with a report based on expert opinion that the safety situation in the Gulf required a moratorium. But after the report was issued, eight of the fifteen experts named said the moratorium language was not even in the draft report they had reviewed, and that they disagreed with the moratorium. They went on to say that a suspension of drilling would have a negative impact on the economy. And some even noted that the moratorium really would not do anything to make the Gulf safer.
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Some experts have even noted the moratorium could make drilling in the Gulf less safe as the most modern equipment may be the first to leave.

I told the president that the oil moratorium amounted to a second man-made disaster. And my message was simple: Louisianians shouldn’t lose their jobs because the federal government can’t do its job. Our belief is that federal officials should spend their energies on getting serious about more rigorous oversight and inspection of oil rigs rather than punishing workers. The experts picked by the federal government made dozens of specific recommendations to improve safety. Experts have recommended and we have supported a temporary pause, redundant blowout preventer equipment, federal inspectors on every rig, inspections of the safety records of each company and each rig, etc. Louisianians, of all people, don’t want to see another drop of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico or another tragic loss of life.

The president went on to assure me that anyone who lost their job would get a check from BP. When I explained that BP might not write them checks because it was the federal government that imposed the
moratorium the president said, “Well, if BP won’t pay the claim, they can file for unemployment.” I was amazed by the level of disconnect. The people of Louisiana want to work, not collect unemployment or BP checks.

BP’s response was as bad as the federal government’s. Part of it was the corporate leadership. And on one level you can’t really be surprised by the response of BP—they were doing what you would expect from a corporation. They were simply looking to protect their shareholders. But I was stunned that BP execs didn’t go out much into the field to see exactly what was happening. One who did was Bob Dudley, who is now the newly minted CEO of BP. We took him for a boat trip to visit East Grand Terre, and I give Dudley credit for coming. But during that trip members of my staff noticed the sole of a shoe on the bottom of the boat. Not an entire shoe—just the sole of the shoe. Turns out that Dudley later admitted it was his. He had stepped in some black, toxic crude, and it had literally eaten the sole off of the rest of his shoe until it apparently came completely apart when we got into the boat. And he was as surprised as anyone that the oil was that corrosive. Dudley got on his headset and said something like, “This stuff is really bad, corrosive. It took off the sole of my shoe.” He had to walk back to his car without the sole of one of his shoes. One of my aides told me, “A BP exec has now truly lost his sole.”

As I look back, the oil spill has reinforced several principles I have learned through my years of dealing with crises.