March 14, 2011 Issue

Raffi Khatchadourian’s excellent “The Gulf War,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, convincingly corrects at least two major misconceptions regarding last year’s massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: (1) that the government wrongfully ceded control over the spill response to BP; (2) that BP’s response was inept. Khatchadourian says:

It has become conventional wisdom that the BP-funded response to the spill was a chaotic and mismanaged affair, driven by corporate avarice, lacking in urgency, and at times willfully negligent of the problem’s scope – the idea being that any organization that had caused such a catastrophe, and that was so clearly unprepared for it, could not in good faith clean up the scene of the disaster. The evidence for this is much like the imagery of heavy oiling: vivid and convincing upon first consideration, but also fragmentary and anecdotal. At the peak of the cleanup effort, forty-seven thousand people were fighting the oil, a community equivalent in size to Annapolis, or the workforce of G.M. – as one federal scientist called it, “a company built in the middle of the night.” In just half a year, the response expended nearly sixty million man-hours, roughly nine times what it took to build the Empire State Building. After the well ruptured [on April 20, 2010], BP accepted help from competing oil companies, and hired the world’s leading oil-pollution specialists to run key operations. The logistical demands on the effort, which spanned the entire Gulf coast – a region of varied geography and political culture – were immense. President Obama was not exaggerating when he announced in June, “This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country."

Khatchadourian’s impressive article is divided into eight parts that describe, among other interesting things, the efforts of a Shore Clean-Up Assessment Technique (SCAT) team searching for oil pollution in the Louisiana marshland ("One had to travel, sometimes an hour or more, to see the oil - one had to hunt for it"); the strong leadership of Admiral Thad Allen (commandant of the Coast Guard, “who struggled to keep the various parties united”), Edwin Stanton (commander at the Houma Incident Command Post, who believed “in a big show of force”), and Roger Laferriere (Stanton’s replacement, who recognized that “the principal fight against the oil was offshore, to be conducted with a weapon – dispersants – that many people thought was more harmful than the spill itself”); the alarmist histrionics of the president of Plaquemines Parish, Billy Nungesser (“Like no other official during the spill, Nungasser embodied the rage, anxiety, and frustration that swept through South Louisiana”); President Obama’s involvement in resolving conflicts between local politicians and the responders (at a critical juncture, he says to Admiral Thad Allen, “Thad, I want to get a panel together, and get a roundtable discussion, and then I want to be briefed on the answer, and I want it done in the next few days”); the close collaboration between BP and the Coast Guard (“As the response outgrew what BP was obligated by law to support, the company nonetheless gave the Coast Guard nearly everything it asked for”); the debate over the use of dispersants (“Scientists and activists spoke of the dispersants as if they had been concocted in a weapons lab”).

As it turned out, the use of dispersants may well have been determinative in what appears to be a positive environmental outcome (“Luck certainly played a role in sparing large portions of the coast – a turn in the weather could have made the impact much worse – but a strategy based on dispersing the oil offshore appears to have helped prevent a great deal of crude from hitting the land”).

In terms of writing as pure writing, I enjoyed the last part of “The Gulf War” the most. Wonderfully titled “The Plume Hunters,” it describes, from a first person point of view, a science crew’s search for under-sea oil plumes. In it, Khatchadourian writes my kind of ideal sentence: “It was late on a September night, and in the darkness I climbed up to the bridge.” As a reader, I welcomed Khatchadourian’s appearance in the narrative. I like it when a writer lets us in on his whereabouts and what he’s doing in pursuit of the story. In his brilliant profile of Julian Assange (“No Secrets,” The New Yorker, June 7, 2010), Khatchadourian did the same thing that he does in “The Gulf War” – he waits until near the end of the piece to step inside the narrative frame. I wish he’d write more in the first person. He’s tremendously effective when he does.