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Tag: aftermath

Have We Learned Anything From The BP Oil Spill?

Following the first news of the BP oil spill in April 2010, the public sense of outrage and frustration spread as quickly as the 200 million gallons of crude oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. But more than a year after the worst oil spill in U.S. history, Congress has not passed any legislation to address the safety gaps that led to the disaster. Meanwhile, offshore drilling in the Gulf has rebounded and returned to normal. A new government report about the spill might finally create stricter safety regulations to prevent another catastrophe, as drilling companies rush to take advantage of massive oil discoveries in the Gulf.

The government did temporarily halt deep-water drilling between May and October 2010, but the industry has since resumed operations without many additional regulations and safety standards. Recent deep-water oil discoveries in the Gulf this year have led to a spike in offshore drilling. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, offshore oil production from the Gulf accounts for 29 percent of total domestic crude oil production. Currently, 23 rigs are drilling wells in water deeper than 3,000 feet, which is the same number as two years ago. Even BP is getting in on the action, with two rigs under contract and a large stake in a recent oil discovery. Since the new oil is in deeply buried, highly pressurized rocks, the potential for accidents is great; however industry representatives argue that they have made some safety changes, such as building new deep-water containment systems that would prevent future spills.

In addition to these measures, environmentalists hope the new government report will lead to further regulations and standards. The report, released Wednesday after an investigation by the Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement, placed ultimate responsibility for the spill on BP, saying the company violated seven federal regulations, disregarded safety, and did not take the necessary precautions in cementing the well. The BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion killed 11 people and affected countless others. Earlier government reports had been released, but this most recent investigation placed more blame on BP than the other companies involved in the rig, Transocean and Halliburton. According to AP,

The findings will be used to shape reforms in offshore drilling safety and regulation. They will also be used by lawyers for victims involved in court battles over the oil spill, and by government agencies considering charges and penalties.

“It is only a question of time before BP — along with Transocean and Halliburton — will face criminal charges for their roles in the Gulf oil spill,” said David Uhlmann, a University of Michigan law professor who formerly led the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section.

The new report recommends changes to offshore drilling, including requiring two barriers in a well and having more unannounced visits by regulators. Some Republican lawmakers said they would not adopt reforms until this federal investigation was complete, and congressional leaders have already scheduled hearings to discuss the report. More than a year after the spill, politicians might be finally convinced that there should be further regulations on offshore drilling to prevent another disaster.

The BP oil spill weighed heavily on President Obama’s approval ratings, and the slow response in creating new standards and recommendations might hurt him in the next election. The crisis marked a turning point in Obama’s presidency: According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, June 2010 was the first time more people disapproved of his job performance than approved, and half of people were unsatisfied with how he handled the spill. Even if the investigation leads to tougher regulations of offshore drilling operations, the BP spill will remain a dark spot on his presidency. Whatever the electoral ramifications, the new study gives hope, however belated, that the government will take a more active role in preventing another massive oil spill in the Gulf.

Our Trust Survives

Last month, I was reading a newspaper in a coffeehouse in downtown Providence, R.I., when a stranger walked over to me and pointed to a nearby table.

“Would you mind watching my laptop while I run to my car?” he said.

I returned his smile and said, “Sure.”

I must look pretty harmless, because it’s not unusual for strangers to ask me to guard their stuff. Over the years, I’ve kept watch over lots of luggage, purses, newspapers and, on one memorable occasion, a Chihuahua sleeping in a hot-pink pet carrier.

This time felt different, probably because I was thinking about the upcoming anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Every newspaper in the country was planning special commemorations.

For the first time, it struck me as quite remarkable that most Americans still want to trust one another in this post-9/11 world. So many predicted otherwise, you might remember. So many thought our grand experiment was over.

Certainly, we’ve stooped to unthinkable lows. We’ve made a blood sport of stereotyping and targeting Muslims, most of whom are good and decent people. Fear-mongers now dominate talk show airwaves, fueling the worst among us. They are loud, but they are outliers.

True, we have constant reminders of that horrible day. A lot of us think about it every time we throw our shoes into a bin at the airport or produce a passport to cross the Canadian border. But we still get on planes, many of them bound for faraway places. We board trains, buses and subways. We slide into cars and share the highways with thousands of strangers every day.

We fill arenas for concerts and sporting events. We attend political rallies and town hall meetings and knock on strangers’ doors for campaigns and causes. We send our children off to school, to camp and to college. We stroll in shopping malls, feast at crowded festivals and throng to amusement parks. We gather every week in churches, temples and mosques around the country.

In the weeks and months after the 9/11 attacks, discussions on talk shows and across kitchen tables focused on what we had lost. Almost 3,000 innocent Americans died that day. I remember thinking for weeks that everyone must be scared to death, but I can speak only for myself: I was terrified.

Frantic phone calls that day — to my daughter, my son, my dad. I remember my father saying the same thing over and over into the phone: Jesus. Jesus, Connie. He was not a religious man, but he told me that day he thought he’d stop by the church where my mother used to sing in the choir.

“Just, you know,” he said. And I did.

I have often wished I’d met my husband sooner than 2003, but whenever I recall how I felt on the day of the attacks, I’m glad I didn’t know him then. He was a member of the House of Representatives at the time, and his two daughters — now my beloved stepdaughters — endured several anguishing hours when they couldn’t reach him. Even now, I fight the urge to walk away from my computer and shove that story out of my mind.

All of us have our own fears, our own worst-case scenarios.

This weekend, as a nation, we remember a moment in America when we huddled with those we loved, reeling from a collective shock. We mourn whom and what we lost, search for evidence of what remains. We will marvel at all that has come to pass, all that we’ve survived, in 10 years’ time. Many of us will bend our heads in prayer.

And then it’s onward, into tomorrow, where most of us will continue to believe in the good intentions of total strangers. How else to avoid becoming our own worst nightmares?

We are Americans.

We may not be fearless, but we refuse to be afraid.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and an essayist for Parade magazine. To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Cantor Wants To Cut Disaster Relief — Unless It’s For His District

On Monday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor decided to play politics with the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, declaring on Fox News that any money the government spends on relief for those areas devastated by the hurricane must be paid for by “savings elsewhere,” which means cutting other government expenditures. And not just any government expenditures; Cantor wants to cut funding for policemen, firemen, and other first responders who provide necessary help to communities — especially during natural disasters.

Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu realizes the obvious problem with such an idea. “Does it really make sense,” she asks, “to pay for response and reconstruction costs from past disasters by reducing our capacity to prepare for future disasters?”

It’s not just Democrats who object to Cantor’s plan. Even his fellow Republicans realize it’s foolish. On his radio show, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said, “My concern is that we help people in need. For the FEMA money that’s going to flow, it’s up to them on how they get it. I don’t think it’s the time to get into that [deficit] debate.”

Cantor himself once realized the importance of federal emergency aid — at least when it comes to his own district. In 2004, after his district was stuck by Tropical Storm Gaston, he had no qualms begging for federal emergency aid. At the time, he didn’t seem to care where the money came from and certainly didn’t advocate cutting funding for first-responders. “The magnitude of the damage suffered by the Richmond area is beyond what the Commonwealth [of Virgina] can handle,” he explained in a September 2004 press release, “and that is why I asked the president to make federal funds available for the citizens affected by Gaston.”

Short-term memories are the rule in Washington, but on disaster-relief, the House Majority Leader is setting a new bar.

Six Years After Katrina, Lower 9th Ward Still Bleak

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, the grasses grow taller than people and street after street is scarred by empty decaying houses, the lives that once played out inside their walls hardly imaginable now.

St. Claude Avenue, the once moderately busy commercial thoroughfare, looks like the main street of a railroad town bypassed long ago by the interstate. Most buildings are shuttered, “For Sale” signs stuck on their sides. There aren’t many buyers. And the businesses that are open are mostly corner stores where folks buy pricey cigarettes, liquor and packaged food.

Six years after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the New Orleans neighborhood that was hardest hit still looks like a ghost town. Redevelopment has been slow in coming, and the neighborhood has just 5,500 residents — one-third its pre-Katrina population.

But politicians, investors and celebrities continue to promise a better future. City leaders recently announced plans to rebuild a high school and pave the neighborhood’s roads. And actor Wendell Pierce, who stars in an HBO series about New Orleans, is backing a new supermarket for an area that hasn’t had one in 20 years.

While residents welcome the news, they remain skeptical. Promises have been dashed too many times.

“Look around you at the Katrina houses!” said Robert Stark, a 54-year-old disabled veteran, sweating in stifling August heat on a porch looking onto Flood Street. He waved at two vacant crumbling houses, like so many that dot the Lower 9th Ward.

He shook his head and added: “Look at the grass.” In many lots, fields of high grass grow in place of houses. “There ain’t nothing new down here. Nothing new … nothing new.”

That’s not completely true.

Since Katrina, the predominantly black neighborhood has been the site of rebuilding by environmental groups and thousands of volunteers. There’s now an eco-friendly community center and a cluster of more than 50 modernistic houses, built with the help of actor Brad Pitt. It sits near where the floodwall toppled on Aug. 29, 2005, killing dozens of people and swamping thousands of homes with floodwaters that reached rooftops.

Also, a charter school has been rebuilt and many of the shotgun-style homes and Creole cottages in the older part of the neighborhood, Holy Cross, are a display of bright New Orleans colors and cheery yards.

But residents of the Lower 9th Ward, downriver from the French Quarter, nevertheless feel left behind.

Other parts of New Orleans have flourished thanks to federal recovery dollars that have brought new businesses, schools and streets.

Entrepreneurship and civic engagement is up, city schools have shown test-score gains and the middle class is growing, according to a new report by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, a group tracking the city’s recovery. Even crime — still nearly twice the national average — is being held in check and falling, the report said. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is getting closer to finishing $14 billion in work to better shield the city from future hurricanes.

“Some of the data shows that New Orleans is rebuilding better than before,” said Allison Plyer, deputy director of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.

Still, Plyer said the Lower 9th Ward is among a number of low-income communities that have had difficulty rebuilding since Katrina’s flooding.

In the Lower 9th Ward, the fire station for Engine 39 hasn’t been rebuilt. Instead, the firefighters use a trailer. Schools and churches are boarded up. Scores of houses still bear the markings of search-and-rescue crews — the now familiar “X” spray painted on doors and the front of houses to designate whether a building had been searched, by whom and whether any bodies had been found inside. The only difference is they are faded now.

The lack of people makes those who’ve come back feel that their neighborhood has been forgotten, even though a steady stream of politicians came to promise to help after Katrina and millions of dollars flowed in.

Now there’s a new push to revive the neighborhood.

In recent days, city leaders have put forward plans to rebuild the Alfred Lawless High School and spend $45 million repaving most of the streets where the heaviest damage took place.

A group of investors that includes Pierce, a New Orleans native starring on the HBO show “Treme,” has announced plans to build a full-scale grocery store on the grounds of a former baseball field by 2013. Developers hope to get federal hurricane recovery low-interest and forgivable loans. If built, the 25,000-square-foot store would represent one of the first pioneering commercial investments for the Lower 9th Ward since Katrina.

Pierce said big-chain supermarkets are unable to see the potential for profit in a place like the Lower 9th Ward, where his parents lived before he was born.

“Corporate America only sees the risk side of the ledger,” he said. “I’m tired of industry standing on the sidelines. There is value here, there is wealth here… It’s pent-up demand and I feel as though it is something that can be mined.”

Not everyone is convinced.

David J. Livingston, a Wisconsin-based grocery consultant who’s studied the New Orleans market, said the Lower 9th Ward is too depopulated to support a supermarket. He questioned whether the Lower 9th Ward, cut off by an industrial canal from the rest of New Orleans, can ever be a lively spot for commerce despite the best efforts of actors Pitt and Pierce.

“All the work that Brad Pitt has done, has it really made a significant difference? Glad he did it, better than it was. But it’s still not the garden spot of New Orleans,” Livingston said, referring to the cluster of eco-friendly homes built by the Pitt-backed foundation Make It Right.

But local residents and merchants hold out hope the supermarket can help turn things around.

“Maybe some of the folks going to the supermarket would come here,” said April Lawrence, the owner of a beauty salon who took a chance and opened in 2009 on Dauphine Street. “Today, I have just one client,” she said glumly. Unless business picks up, she said, she will have to close.

Down the street, regulars sat outside on the sidewalk in front of Mercedes’ Place, a bar and video poker spot, chatting, drinking and smoking. For them, anything would be better than the options they have now: Drive miles to get something decent to cook up at home.

“It’s needed!” Lynette Gibson said emphatically and loudly. She helps her 72-year-old mother, Mercedes, run the bar.

She shook her head at the thought of the handful of gas stations and convenience stores on the main streets. “It’s limited,” she said. “They only satisfy neighborhood people who drink.”

Roosevelt Johnson Sr., a 51-year-old disabled veteran, stood outside his house and looked at the empty grass field where the grocery store would be built.

“With them bringing a supermarket, it might increase property values,” he reasoned. “It might bring some normalcy back here. Make it like any other neighborhood where you go 10 minutes to the supermarket.”