The Gulf Mess: A Little Less Oil — and a Lot More Anger

It's not in President Obama's nature to get angry — at least not visibly. He prefers a cool and measured response, and for the most part that's marked the way his technocratic Administration has responded to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in this country's history. But 45 days have passed since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, beginning a spill that has poured up to 46 million gal. of oil into the Gulf, and with photos of birds in Louisiana drenched in heavy crude burning up the Internet, the President seems ready to get mad. "I'm furious at this entire situation," he told CNN's Larry King in an interview late Thursday. And BP — the energy giant responsible for the spill — "has felt the anger."

Obama had another chance to express that anger on Friday afternoon, when he made his third visit — and second in a little more than a week — to Louisiana, to huddle with Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen and a group of local, state and federal officials, including Florida Governor Charlie Crist, whose state's coastline will likely be the next to be hit by the expanding spill. Already there are confirmed reports of tar balls — coagulated patches of oil — washing up on the shores near Pensacola, on the Florida Panhandle. "We're concerned," Crist told CNN on Friday morning. He didn't try to hide his anger. "A state as beautiful as Florida, if you envision the concept of oil coming up on our shores and it doesn't make you angry, something's wrong with you."

The good news for Crist and the worried residents of Florida — which could take a major economic hit if tourists stay away from the beaches because of oil — is that BP is finally reporting some success in its efforts to stop the flow of oil. After cutting the broken riser pipe on Thursday, BP managed to place a containment cap over the ruptured well, and has begun siphoning oil up to a ship waiting on the surface. "Progress is being made," Allen told reporters on Friday morning. Still, he added, "we have to caution against over-optimism here."

He's right. While the containment cap has been fitted over the riser pipe, most of the oil from the leak is still spilling into the ocean through custom-made vents, though for now that's by design. The escaping oil should keep cold water from flowing in — at 5,000 feet below the surface, where the well is, the water temperature is barely above freezing — and prevent the formation of icy hydrates that could clog the oil flow to the surface. That's what happened the last time BP tried to use a containment dome on this spill, which led to the operation being scrapped. As the vents are closed, BP should capture a greater and greater percentage of the oil flow. Hydrates will still be a risk, but this cap — unlike the earlier containment units — will also be supplied with methanol, which is often used in deep-sea drilling to prevent hydrate formation.

Still, in cutting the riser pipe, BP's underwater robots had to do the job with shears, when the sharper, more precise diamond saw grew dull. That led to a more jagged cut, and potentially a looser seal with the containment cap. The company adjusted by using a different cap — several have been put on the floor of the Gulf as backups — which they hope will fit snugly. Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, told CNN on Friday morning that the goal is for the operation to divert "90-plus percent" of the oil, which would finally begin to allow responders to focus on cleaning up the oil that has already been spilled — no easy task given how much is already in the water. But Kent Wells, a senior vice president at BP who provided a briefing on the operation, cautioned that it will likely take at least a day to know how much oil really is being captured — and to ensure that the flow will remain smooth. "It's obviously hard to predict after we've only had about 12 hours of experience with this," he said on Friday afternoon. "I just don't want us to get ahead of ourselves."

As the crisis wears on, there's little chance of that happening. Already the oil spill — which could continue until August, albeit lessened, even if the cap works — threatens to swallow Obama's agenda. The White House announced that he was postponing a planned 10-day trip to Australia and Indonesia to focus on the crisis at home, and in recent days the Administration has appeared to come down harder on BP, opening a criminal investigation to the spill on June 1. But the President is playing from behind — a CBS poll released on Friday found that 63% of Americans felt the government should be doing more in response to the spill.

Of course, there may not be a whole lot more that Obama — or anyone else in the White House — can do to stop the spill. Only BP has the expertise and technology to close the well, even if the government is officially supervising the effort. (The Oscar-winning director James Cameron — who learned a thing or two about underwater filming when he directed The Abyss, Titanic and a Titanic documentary — has offered his own deep-sea expertise on the spill, and compared the BP-federal relationship to "asking the perpetrator to give you the video of the crime scene.") More can always be done on the ground all along the affected Gulf shoreline, but so far the necessary resources from Washington seem to be there.

Obama can use the bully pulpit of the presidency to press the moral case against BP — something he's been doing with greater fervency in recent days. At a news briefing in New Orleans on Friday afternoon, Obama warned BP against paying multibillion-dollar dividends to their shareholders even as the oil spill in the Gulf continued. "The fact that BP could pay a $10.5 billion dividend payment is indicative of how much money these folks have been making," he said. "Given the fact that they didn't fully account for the risks, I don't want somebody else bearing the costs of the risks they took."

Ultimately, though, there's not much the President can do to end the spill at its source. Of course, given the public anger toward BP — 70% of Americans in that CBS poll feel the company should be doing more — Obama could always score some points by channeling that rage. But even if he's mad inside, don't expect him to show it. "I would love to just spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people," Obama said on Thursday. "But that's not the job I was hired to do. My job is to solve this problem." He's right — but so far, results have been a lot harder to come by than rage.