Five Months Later....

Grease Lightning 

        Today, almost exactly five months after the fact, the US government finally declared the exploded oil well in the Gulf of Mexico to be "dead"--completely capped and no longer hazardous.  Five months and 4.9 MILLION barrels of oil later seems like a bit too much waste to me--the impact on the local economies of the Gulf (which were highly dependent on a once-thriving tourist trade), let alone the vast destruction of the oceanic habitat, has been tremendous.  Although the well is capped, there is still much to be done before the problem is to be fixed; there is still rather a large quantity of that unfortunately slick brown stuff floating about in an ocean previously full of wildlife and successful commercial fishing businesses.
         The fact that it took five months for the government (and the company BP) to fully control the oil spill and secure the oil righ indicates (to me at least) that there is something wrong with the government's response mechanism to man-made (and natural, for that matter) disasters.  This, I suppose, is one of the cons of an expansive bureaucracy.  In one of the articles I read on the subject, an investigation on accountability for the spill passed from National Incident Command to an agency of the Department of the Interior, just because.  I know when the spill was at its most critical, there was at least as much investigation (both within and outside of the government) on the issue of accountability as there was on the much more pressing issue of how to cap the leak itself.  And the response time just wasn't what it should have been--I know I cannot fully appreciate the complexity of coming up with a solution to a problem so complex as the Deep Horizon leak, but I do know that I felt a little disappointed at the President and Congress' reticence to take more action.  Five months is far too long.