US Now "Owns the Podium" with Respect to Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Now that the US Dept. of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into BP's conduct with respect to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig fire, explosion and ensuing oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the tone of the US's government's attitude to BP has changed noticeably. For one thing, USCG Vice-Admiral Mary Landry has been stood down from her duties with respect to the spill response operation- from now on she'll be dealing with preparations for the oncoming hurricane season in the Gulf. Also, we are told there will be no more joint US Govt-BP press conferences. Instead, USCG Admiral Thad Allen will be the prime spokesperson for anything to do with the spill. Apparently, then, the US government is seeking to 'own the podium', some forty-five days into the spill response operation.

In other words, the rather cozy relationship that we've seen thus far between the Repsonsible Party, aka "The Polluter" and the Incident Commmander, in the form of the Coast Guard head, has ended. There's no way the Coast Guard and BP could be seen standing shoulder to shoulder when BP itself is under criminal investigation for its conduct before, during and after the incident which occurred on April 20, 2010, when the rig caught fire and exploded as a result of a blowout, with the loss of ten lives. How this seachange will affect the spill response operation on the ground is anyone's guess, since the government is still dependent upon the oilpatch for much of the subsea expertise and equipment, but it does reflect increasing exasperation on the part of the White House with respect to BP's handling of the spill. Chances are the public and private sectors will continue to cooperate, since they have little choice but to do so, really, but on the public level the optics will be substantially different. And with the Coast Guard's Thad Allen now become the public face of the BP spill, there is now the risk that if yet another attempt to stem the leak fails, the public will increasingly blame the government for the entire fiasco rather than the actual polluter.