Giant oil skimmer makes stop in Norfolk on way to Gulf oil cleanup:
After making a brief stop in Norfolk for refueling, U.S. Coast Guard inspections and an all-out publicity blitz intended to drum up public support, a giant tanker billed as the world's largest oil skimming vessel set sail Friday for the Gulf of Mexico where it hopes to assist in the oil-cleanup effort....
In other words, the feds have been, and will be, dicking around for days or even weeks making this ship jump through bureaucratic hoops while more oil spills into the gulf.
They're still
testing the thing, rather than put it to actual use:
- The latest hopes are riding on a massive new skimmer to clean oil from near the spewing well in the Gulf of Mexico, while a local Louisiana parish's plan to block the slick has been rejected by federal officials.
A 48-hour test of the Taiwanese vessel dubbed "A Whale" began Saturday and was to continue through Sunday.
TMT Shipping created what is billed as the world's largest oil skimmer by converting an oil tanker after the April 20 explosion sent millions of gallons of crude spilling into the Gulf.
The vessel was expected to cruise a 25-square-mile test site just north of the Macondo Deepwater well site, company officials said....The ship arrived in the Gulf on Wednesday, but officials have wanted to test its capability as well as have the federal Environmental Protection Agency sign off on the water it will pump back into the Gulf, which will contain trace amounts of crude.
The wait has frustrated some local officials, who say the mammoth skimmer would be a game-changer in keeping oil from reaching vulnerable coastlines.
During a Thursday tour of the inlet to Barataria Bay, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said it was exasperating to have A Whale anchored offshore instead of being put to immediate use.
"They've used the war rhetoric," Jindal said aboard a boat floating in oil-slicked waters near Grand Isle. "If this is really a war, they need to be using every resource that makes sense to fight this oil before it comes to our coast."
But wait, there's more:
- The governor, who has been outspoken in his criticism of the relief effort, also criticized a decision by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reject a proposal by Jefferson Parish to build a series of rock dikes to protect the ecologically important Barataria Bay.
Parish officials were using a fleet of barges — dubbed the "Cajun Navy" — as temporary barriers to block the oil, but some was still seeping in. The Corps found that the dike plan was incomplete, lacking a designated agency to remove the barriers, a restoration plan for environmental damage and data to measure any such damage.
"The Corps took weeks to review the plan only to reject it today — and this denial is another unfortunate example of the federal government's lack of urgency in this war to protect our coast," said Kyle Plotkin, Jindal's press secretary.
I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon with WB that Obama WANTS the spill to get worse to ram through new environmental regs and taxes ("
never let a crisis go to waste") but it's hard to deny the bureaucratic mess he's creating is anything but complete incompetence.
