Monday, July 05, 2010
"Avertible catastrophe"
If you live on the Gulf Coast, this article may make you angry.
For the rest of us, it just highlights the incompetency of government (ours); or, how the need to politicize everything for some advantage gets in the way of accomplishing anything efficiently...
For the rest of us, it just highlights the incompetency of government (ours); or, how the need to politicize everything for some advantage gets in the way of accomplishing anything efficiently...
Lawrence Solomon tells about it in the Financial Post:
"Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. 'Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,' Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.
To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn't capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana's marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks."
