Leadership and Crisis (2 page)

People in Louisiana wonder why the federal response was so slow. You would think following the withering criticisms of President Bush during Hurricane Katrina that the federal response this time would have been swift and sure. You would have thought that a White House so concerned about its image would have been all over this.

For us, the oil spill was not just a threat to our beaches. It was a threat to our way of life. The Louisiana coastline, a fragmented and complicated system of marshes, is a fragile ecosystem with all kinds of
vegetation and marine life that could potentially be destroyed by even the temporary presence of oil. Commercial fishing in Louisiana is a $2 billion industry, and fishing (both recreational and commercial) creates 60,000 jobs. One-third of the domestic seafood in the continental U.S. comes from Louisiana. Again—this isn’t just a few guys who happen to fish for a living, this is a top industry in our state.

I believe that a big part of the problem with the federal response was that the administration was overly optimistic and too willing to trust the so-called experts. They believed that the elite could fix everything. It struck me during our conversations how often the president mentioned that his secretary of energy, Steven Chu, had won the Nobel Prize. Good for him. But just how exactly was this medal going to fix the problem, cap the well, and keep the oil off our coastline? It became very apparent during this crisis the administration believed the bureaucrats, whether they worked in government or for BP. The press noticed that the White House was deferential to BP and their alleged expertise from the beginning. They basically believed what BP executives were telling them. I think President Obama figured that we just needed to get all the smart people in a room (that would be easy, since most of them reside in Washington) and then they would fix the problem. He trusted the bureaucrats—both corporate and federal. He hadn’t been in government long enough (or in the private sector, for that matter) to know that you have to be skeptical. They always seemed to assume the best case scenario rather than preparing for the worst case scenario.

It was a pattern evident from the beginning, one that was repeated again and again. Just a day and half after the well blew, killing eleven workers, there was a meeting between my staff and the Coast Guard. Both the Coast Guard and BP informed us that there was no oil leaking
into the Gulf. (This would prove to be reminiscent of Katrina, when we were assured as the storm hit that the levees were holding.) Then a couple days later word came from BP and the federal government that there was a leak—but it was a small one. Only 1,000 barrels a day. It was a very stable situation, we were told. No big deal. Soon the estimate became 5,000 barrels, then 12,000 to 19,000 barrels, then 25,000 to 30,000 barrels, and finally 35,000 to 60,000 barrels. A week after the explosion, when I asked about the impact of hurricanes on the oil, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) official assured me we would not be dealing with the oil by June 1, the beginning of hurricane season; Timmy remarked that it reminded him of five years earlier—when the Corps of Engineers assured us the floodwalls would not breach in New Orleans.

As the oil spread to our waters, both the federal government and BP seemed trapped in their own red tape. Even when the problem was obvious and visible, they were incapable of quick action. At one point we took Coast Guard Captain Ed Stanton, who was then in charge of the response in Louisiana, up in a Louisiana National Guard Black-hawk helicopter to see the oil in Timbalier Bay. We took the man in charge of the response to see the oil because BP contractors would not deploy assets. Then we flew over Cocodrie where you could see the boom and other material literally sitting on the docks, with skimmers nearby that were idle. We expected him, having seen the inaction with his own eyes, to jump on it right away and get going. But he told us it wasn’t that easy. It would take at least twenty-four hours before he could get the assets deployed. Captain Stanton faced such withering criticism for the lack of movement that at one point he snapped to the incredulous media, “I guess I’m just slow and dumb.” But of course it was the system that was slow and dumb, not him.

There was no accountability. Stanton and others were working under a system that was incapable of working quickly and efficiently. It was highly centralized, bureaucratic, and often unresponsive. Process mattered more than results. The Coast Guard operated under an Incident Action Plan (IAP), which was their term for planning the mission for the next day. When oil was spotted on the water, they would put together an IAP, but it would take literally twenty-four to forty-eight hours to actually get skimmer boats on site to clean it up—this means that the problem we saw one day could only be addressed a whole day later... if we were lucky. Of course, timing in a disaster situation is everything. By the time a day passed, the currents might have shifted and the oil might be miles away. Authority was too distant and too rigid to be responsive. (Doesn’t that sound like a problem with the federal government in other areas, too?) What we needed were local command centers on the ground that could react and respond more quickly.

Think of it this way. When our soldiers in World War II encountered the enemy, they did the only smart thing: they attacked with the intent to kill. For the people of Louisiana, this was war. When we saw oil coming on to our coast, we did everything we could to stop it, to kill it. There was no time to call back to headquarters, to fill out some forms, or to wait for orders from Washington.

One day I remember vividly, there was thick, black crude in Bay Jimmy off of Grand Isle. We asked the Coast Guard why there were still not enough skimmers at work. They were using only a fraction of the available vessels. One problem was there was a bottleneck when it came to spotter planes and insufficient communications equipment. Apparently they simply didn’t have enough air traffic control capacity. When we suggested that they request assistance from the military, and
also use some of the excess vessels to provide water-based visibility, it was like a revelation. The thought had apparently never occurred to them.

People assume that BP must have been better because after all, they’re in the private sector. But BP CEO Tony Hayward seemed to suffer from the same sense of hubris. On top of that, he had little sense of accountability. “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” he reportedly exclaimed to his fellow executives as the crisis unfolded. He seemed to downplay the realities of the situation at best and exhibit arrogance at worst. “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” he told reporters on one occasion. “The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” He was seemingly nonchalant about how the very way of life for tens of thousands of people in my state was at risk. Asked whether he was sleeping at night he replied, “Yeah, of course I am.” When he tried to offer apologies he messed that up, too. “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused to their lives,” he said famously. “There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do; I’d like my life back.” When workers complained of feeling ill from breathing oil fumes all day, Hayward brushed it off and managed to insult our cooking at the same time. He said that the workers were feeling sick possibly because of “food poisoning.” I don’t know what Hayward will do after he leaves BP, but let me make a bold prediction that he has no future in public relations or brand management.
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Hayward obviously felt terribly inconvenienced by the oil spill. And he had little interest in hearing solutions the locals had in mind to deal with a disaster that his company had caused. During our second meeting together, Hayward came to my office, and he had a very specific mission: he wanted me to sign off on the use of subsea
dispersants, chemicals that would disperse the oil near where the leak was occurring. I had no real authority here. BP could do this with the approval of the Coast Guard. But he wanted legal cover, so he pressed me to sign off on it. I said I first wanted him to show me the science that the dispersants would not have adverse affects on the Gulf. When I expressed to him the need for us to build sand berms along the coast to help keep the oil out of the marshes, he was completely dismissive. He deemed the berms as more important in protecting the state against hurricanes than oil. (He failed to grasp the concept that a hurricane surge would bring more oil deeper into our marsh, making these barriers critical protection for both oil and hurricanes.) He was so arrogant he didn’t even want to listen to me make the case. He lacked the common sense even to pretend to be interested in what I was saying. He was tone-deaf and clueless. I thought to myself, I can’t believe this guy runs a multi-billion dollar company. This guy would not succeed as a used car salesman.

If the oil spill crisis teaches us one thing, it is that a distant, central command and control model simply didn’t work with the fast-moving and ever-changing crisis that was unfolding. Frankly, some of the best leadership and advice we got was from local leaders, like the parish presidents and fishermen. As far as I can tell, none of them has yet to win a Nobel Prize, but they know these waters. And some of the best ideas for cleanup came from locals.

Because the federal government was failing to provide the boom we needed, we came up with creative ideas—Tiger dams, Hesco Baskets, sand-drop operations, and freshwater diversions. It was a local initiative that gave us one of the best techniques for cleaning up: vacuum trucks. The federal government was having workers clean the marsh grasses with the equivalent of paper towels. We thought of the bright
idea of putting a large vacuum truck, like the kind that they use to clean Port-a-Potties, on top of a National Guard pontoon boat. They were highly effective in sucking up the oil.

Another local innovation was the “jack up barge”—commonly used here to help the oil industry service rigs out in the water. The Coast Guard and BP couldn’t figure out how to rapidly deploy boom in response to specific oil sightings in marsh areas and to stretch their supplies instead of trying futilely to protect the entire coast, so Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungusser suggested that we use these barges that people could live on and supply them with lots of boom so response boats could stock up and go directly to oiled areas in the water in real time without having to come all the way back to the shore.

In Grand Isle, they started using rigid pipe to act as a high water boom to help with the oil. There was such a void in the federal response—lack of boom, lack of approval on plans to use rocks and barges to stop the oil, to name a few—that they used this pipe to hold the oil back. It served as a barrier to protect vulnerable estuaries, and was yet another innovative use of ordinary oil field equipment. Simply put, working with locals we were able to use whatever we could get our hands on to stop oil from coming into our fragile marshes and waters. We did what the federal government just couldn’t: act quickly and efficiently to protect our shores. Unlike them, we were never satisfied with just doing nothing.

We quickly discovered that the only way to get things done by either BP or the federal government was to go public. The national media was very helpful in this regard. When we asked for the Coast Guard to give us their plans for deploying and prioritizing boom to contain the oil spill, we heard nothing for more than a week. So we met with the parish presidents, and the next day we had our plans
posted online. We went on TV and explained our plan, and suddenly there was some action. The federal government seemed to be motivated by the potential for bad media coverage but ... at least we were finally getting their attention.

During the president’s second trip to Louisiana, on May 28, we were down in Grand Isle and were meeting with the parish presidents whose parishes were being affected by the spill. It was a strange presidential visit in that before the president arrived, a group of workers were bussed in to clean the beach before the president walked it. (As of this writing, as far as I know, the president has never actually seen heavy oil from the spill; my staff and I, however, went almost daily to show the world and the nation the true caliber of this disaster.) The meeting included local officials, but Billy Nungusser and St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro had to crash it, even though their parishes had been heavily affected by the oil. They showed up without an invite to represent their people. That’s Billy and Craig.

Before the meeting broke up, President Obama singled out Billy and me and told us to stop going on television and criticizing him. “I go home every night and I see on TV people saying I’m not doing anything,” he said. “I don’t need to see you guys on CNN criticizing us.” For some reason he was particularly miffed that Billy was going on with Anderson Cooper. It was the oddest conversation. Actually, it was not really a conversation. It was more like a lecture. Before we had a chance to reply and explain that this seemed to be the only way to get federal action, the president adjourned the meeting. Again, the White House seemed to focus on the wrong things. I felt like we needed to be on a wartime footing against the oil, and the president was wondering,
why is everybody criticizing me? The irony is that right after that exchange, someone from the White House staff came over to prepare us for the all important photo opportunity where the president would make remarks to the national press. The staff member was insistent that I stand next to the president. But before the photographers arrived, Florida Governor Charlie Crist edged me out of the way. I was happy to yield the ground.

Billy was honest and open in his views on the failure of the federal government to adequately respond to the situation. At one point he had a conversation with Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry who was upset about his criticisms and asked him to tone them down in the meeting with the president. She said he was criticizing thousands of people in the Coast Guard, but Billy told her he was only criticizing her. At the end of the meeting they patched things up. The Coast Guard admiral later asked him for a hug. “Everyone needs a hug,” Billy told the admiral.