Six Things We Need To Know About the Gulf Oil Spill

I just had a great weekend at my 25th college reunion away from the news, remembering the past and reconnecting with old friends. I had heard earlier in the week that we were awaiting results of BP's latest attempt to put a tourniquet on the gash they put into the earth that is threatening the health and vitality of the world's great seas, the Mexican Gulf. I have also heard more frustration and uncertainty about what our situation is. We go from one BP-proposed Hail Mary technique to the next. And the angst of the American people is becoming more palpable each day.

Maybe I'm just not informed enough about what is going on, but I think we may be suffering from too much information about an arbitrary set of things. If this were a spill on my property, I would not be satisfied if the contractor kept coming back to me with partial information about what the situation is. After a few days of hearing, "I'm not sure what's happening or what to do about it," I would demand that he take a different strategy. I would want to know the few pieces of key information that would guide my decisions, policies and areas of focus on getting my arms around what seems to be an intractable problem.

So, I propose that we start asking for six pieces of information from our government on a regular basis. Where they get this information from -- BP, the Military, university scientists -- that's the job of experts. But with these six pieces of information, we will understand a lot about the current situation, and both the rationale and effectiveness of solutions being proposed or tried out.

1. New flow of oil into the Gulf. We need to know this in order to have any idea whether we are making progress on the clean-up. If your boat springs a leak at one bucket per minute, you better be able to bail at faster than one bucket per minute, or your boat will sink.
2. Volume of oil being captured. I hear that we are "vacuuming" up oil from the surface into tankers. How much volume? A simplistic analysis might be able to tell what percent oil vs. seawater is being sucked up, thereby telling us how much oil is being removed from the Gulf.
3. Net increase / decrease in spill. This is (1) minus (2). We should know this number, because until it is negative, the problem is just continuing to get worse. It also could focus us on strategies to suck up the oil while we're waiting for the leak to be plugged. It seems to me that, if oil is so valuable, it would be important for someone to capture the oil and find a way to refine it (get the saltwater out), instead of poisoning the water supply with emullsifiers, or whatever they're dumping in the Gulf now.
4. Undersea map of uncaptured oil. We also need to know where the uncaptured oil is, and where it is likely to go. It is not all on the surface, like with the Exxon Valdez; rather, it is mushrooming out from the sea floor upwards. We should also be able to forecast, like the weather, where the oil "clouds" are.
5. Protection strategies for endangered zones. We should know the strategy that is being employed for every section of our coastland, how impacted it already is or what is the risk of impact.
6. Clean-up strategies for endangered zones. Cleaning up a contaminated marsh is different from removing oil from a sand berm or a rock surface.

Now, knowing this information does not automatically result in a cleaner Gulf; however, I see no way for our leaders (or BP, or citizens' groups) to make helpful decisions on resolving this catastrophe without it. I am weary of information that is not useful in providing insight.

I understand that BP is afraid of making itself further liable. And the federal government does not want to remove responsibility for action from BP. But we need a federal project manager that is systematically employing strategies to outrace the leak from the sea floor. Public confidence will grow in this solution as we see strategies that have a clear impact. We all know that the situation is at disaster levels. We are all conjecturing differently about what's happening, though, and that's not all that helpful, especially when some targeted intelligence on the situation could help everyone know where we need to focus. Would building more berms faster help? What are the trade-offs in doing that? Would employing more tankers to vacuum up the spill be helpful? And if they do, do we know what to do with the vacuumed oil-and-water? Do we have refineries that can strip out oil from water? Does anyone?

Because we, the people, don't know the answers to these seemingly obvious questions, we start to fret. We start to panic. As Captain Lovell (dramatized by Tom Hanks in Apollo 13) said (paraphrased), "We must not go bouncing off the walls, at each other's throats. Because we're just going to be back in the same place with the same problems." Now is the time for Apollo 13-style problem-solving. And that means solving the whole problem, wringing every risk and negative outcome out, and employing every means necessary before it is too late.

If everyone else knows this and I am the only one who didn't get the memo, I apologize. But so far for me, there's been a lot of ink spilled, but not a lot of focused problem-solving.

My 2 cents...