.....he can’t do anything without his handlers saying so.....
the true Manchurian Candidate.
This expert is mincing no words - he thinks it was a political decision not to take the short window of opportunity they had to burn off the oil and contain the spill early on:
MOBILE, Ala. -- Federal officials should have started burning oil off the surface of the Gulf last week, almost as soon as the spill happened, said the former oil spill response coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Ron Gouget, who also managed Louisiana's oil response team for a time, said federal officials missed a narrow window of opportunity to gain control of the spill by burning last week, before the spill spread hundreds of miles across the Gulf, and before winds began blowing toward shore. ...
Gouget, now an environmental consultant with Windward Associates in Seattle, was part of the group that created the 1994 plan designed to allow federal responders to begin burning oil as soon as a major spill occurred, without an approval process.
"They had pre-approval. The whole reason the plan was created was so we could pull the trigger right away instead of waiting ten days to get permission," Gouget said. "If you read the pre-approval plan, it speaks about Grand Isle, where the spill is. When the wind is blowing offshore out of the north, you have preapproval to burn in that region. If the wind is coming onshore, like it is now, you can't burn at Grand Isle. They waited to do the test burn until the wind started coming onshore." ....
He said the NOAA officials involved at the Unified Command Center in Louisiana know how to respond to spills, and know burning should have started as soon as possible after the initial release was detected.
Gouget said they may have been overruled.
"It may have been a political issue.
The burn would make a big big plume and lots of soot. Like Valdez, the decisions to get the resources mobilized may not have occurred until it was too late," Gouget said.
"This whole thing has been a daily strip tease. ...It's unfortunate they didn't get the burning going right away. They could have gotten 90 percent of the oil before it spread."
Gouget said portions of the oil will still burn, especially the stuff bubbling up from the broken well. (Watch Coast Guard video of test burns here.)