Quotes of the Day

Every few years, government officials gather to prepare for the unthinkable. Back in April 2002, the Coast Guard held one such exercise, a three-day summit at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans. It was designed to simulate a response to an oil spill of "national significance." The catalyst? A hypothetical explosion on an ExxonMobil platform off the coast of Morgan City, La., that sent 126,000 gal. of crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. The man in charge was a Coast Guard vice admiral named Thad Allen. Sitting in the center of a horseshoe of tables, Allen cycled through possible response scenarios, soliciting opposing viewpoints and displaying "confident, positive leadership," says Michael Drieu, the retired Coast Guard commander who coordinated the exercise.

Eight years later, Admiral Allen is in charge again, but this is no drill. As national incident commander for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Allen — who retired from the Coast Guard on June 30 — is the point man for the government's response to the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. If BP has cut a callous figure and President Barack Obama sometimes struggles to calibrate his outrage, Allen's candor and competence have brought an aura of calm to the crisis. Bald and burly, with a clipped delivery and your grandfather's mustache, he seems straight out of Central Casting, the military lifer who seems to devour briefing books whole. "I don't know that there's anybody out there who knows more [about this] than he does," says Carol Browner, assistant to the President for energy and climate change. "You give him a problem, he solves it."

Solutions to this problem, however, have so far been in short supply. BP's managing director, Bob Dudley, told the Wall Street Journal on July 7 that the company had an outside shot at plugging the well by the end of the month, but the battle to stop the spill has been riddled with setbacks — from a robotic submersible dislodging the well's containment cap to the steady upward revisions of the scope of the damage. Wary of missing more deadlines, Allen demanded that BP provide a detailed outline of its plans to stop the slick. He is still hewing to the mid-August timetable he's cited for weeks. "The order of magnitude" of the disaster, he told TIME last month, "dwarfs anything we've seen before."

Over the past decade, Allen, 61, has been one of the federal government's go-to fixers in times of tragedy. In the frenzied wake of Sept. 11 he was tasked with tightening port security along the eastern seaboard. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) fumbled the response to Hurricane Katrina, Allen was dispatched to New Orleans to resuscitate the rescue effort. After the Haiti earthquake in January, Allen was the commandant leading the response. "When the clarion call comes," says Admiral James Loy, Allen's former boss, "he's a guy who tries with every bone in his body to rise to the occasion."

When Allen is at home in Washington, he works out of a small office at the Department of Homeland Security. After plowing through progress reports from the affected states and the site of the spill, he sometimes sits in on the governors' conference call or meets with the heads of other government agencies. Allen files many of these meetings under the rubric of "establishing unity of purpose," an example of the bureaucratic patois — phrases like "stovepipe organization" or "horizontal integration" — peppering his paragraphs. At some point he also briefs the media, whose search to assign blame for the flaws in the response has sometimes zeroed in on Allen himself. And then? "Then we start all over again the next day," Allen says.

In some ways Allen has been training for the job his whole life. Born in Tucson, Ariz., he was a military brat who was uprooted frequently to follow his father, a Coast Guard vet who rose to the rank of chief petty officer. Thad was driven and brainy, earning master's degrees from George Washington University and MIT after graduating from the Coast Guard Academy, and he inherited from his dad both an attachment to the organization and an appreciation for the lifestyle that attends it. "For me it was a draw," Allen says of his peripatetic career, during which he has lived in 47 different places. By 2006 Allen was tapped to become commandant, the Coast Guard's top post. Though his four-year stint ended in May, he agreed to stay on as national incident commander for the spill, a role in which he reports to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Obama.

"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

• Alex Altman
• The Coast Guard admiral has fervent admirers but he may also have been given responsibility for a mess from which no one can emerge unstained