Thad Allen: Obama's Master of Disaster in the Gulf

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"He's just a hypercompetent person," says White House senior adviser David Axelrod. On a helicopter ride during Obama's second trip to the Gulf, Axelrod recalls, the admiral — who was in the midst of explaining the mechanics of capturing oil — pulled a hand-drawn sketch of the procedure from his pocket and explained the diagram in detail. "You forget this is an MIT guy," Axelrod says. "He's adroit in all aspects of this. He's been involved in disasters like this for 40 years." Michael Jackson, a former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security who worked with Allen during the response to Hurricane Katrina, calls Allen "a one-of-a-kind national asset in this case." And yet, Jackson cautions, "nobody is going to be able to wave a wand and make all of these problems go away."

The Coast Guard has hardly been perfect. For example, its blueprint for dealing with a major spill, updated last August, is geared to combat a massive, monolithic slick. The Deepwater Horizon spill, which consists of hundreds of thousands of smaller slicks, is nothing like that. There's no good answer to why this scenario went unplanned for. "I don't think it was a lack of duty or anything," Allen said during a June 7 press briefing. "It was a peculiar set of circumstances that, frankly, weren't anticipated."

Ask Allen what worries him, and he rattles off a grim list. "Start at the source, a mile beneath the surface," he says of the ruptured wellhead, which is accessible only to remote-controlled submersibles. It's not that the government hasn't pulled out the weapons in its arsenal. More than 45,000 responders have helped lay about 8.5 million ft. of boom, applied some 1.7 million gal. of dispersant and used 275 controlled burns to remove about 10 million gal. of oil from the surface of the Gulf (one-third of which remains closed). The problem is they are fighting an unfamiliar war on a drifting battleground. When defending hundreds of miles of shoreline, it helps to have a tested battle plan.

Using the scope of the disaster as an excuse was never going to mollify Gulf Coast politicians, whose constituents have found their livelihoods under siege. Nor should it. But the criticism of Allen's leadership has been biting — and perhaps unfair. "He's not the right man for the job," said Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, La., who likened the disjointed response to "a bunch of rats running around with their heads cut off." Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who tussled with Allen over a controversial proposal to build sand berms to protect fragile marshes, takes the response effort — and by extension Allen — to the woodshed on a near daily basis. BP's estimates of the amount of oil spilling from the wellhead and the amount it is capable of capturing have been wildly off target. And when the pundit James Carville spotted Allen dining with BP chief executive Tony Hayward at a posh Italian restaurant in New Orleans around the beginning of June, it amplified critics' perceptions that Allen needed to tighten the screws on BP.

For his part, Allen downplays the blowback. "To the extent that it becomes more political than operational," he says, "I try not to let it rent space in my head." The admiral says he has a direct line to both Obama and Hayward. "When I call [BP], they pick up the phone immediately, and they are always responsive to what I say." He says BP has flubbed "the retail end of the spill" — which in Allen's argot means meeting obligations to the public. "No matter how much good you're doing on the bottom of the ocean with an unbelievably difficult technology situation," he says, "you don't get very much trade space when the public thinks you're not paying attention to them."

Allen says the most important skill he learned during past crises is patience. Navigating the shoals of bureaucracy requires mastering different sets of jargon, an alphabet soup of federal acronyms and clashing egos and interests. Gil Jamieson, Allen's deputy during Katrina, recalls the admiral was able to defuse politically charged situations by finding common ground, like when he worked with former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin — who was under pressure from displaced residents to reopen dangerous swaths of town after Hurricane Katrina — to craft a look-and-leave policy that satisfied residents while maintaining safety standards.

Preparation and political acumen are not all the Gulf needs. The disaster is uncharted territory. This is not Katrina, which blew through and left bodies floating in its wake, or the Haiti earthquake, the force of which ravaged the presidential palace and transformed the nation's capital into tent cities of misery. An oil spill is a menace lurking largely out of sight, a tragedy that announces itself in quiet moments — a seafood shack standing empty at lunchtime, a boat bobbing at its dock. Perhaps because of his training, or perhaps to underscore the sense of urgency, Allen tends to use martial metaphors to underscore the severity of the spill. The oil is "an insidious enemy that's attacking our shores," he has said. "It is holding the Gulf Coast hostage."

At times a whiff of fatalism seems to have crept into the effort. "In an oil spill, there are no winners," says Loy. That adage especially applies to the guy in the hot seat, and Allen knows it. When he was asked to take over the Katrina response, he had a frank talk with his wife about whether it would be wise to accept the assignment. "I told her I'd been preaching for 30 years that if you've got an opportunity and a particular competency, you've got to do it," Allen recalls. This time, he didn't hesitate to take the opportunity but competency alone may not be enough.

— With reporting by Michael Scherer / Washington