National Incident Commander Thad Allen has rebuked BP for being “very pleased” about the company’s failed efforts to contain the disaster he described as an “insidious enemy” that is “holding the gulf hostage.” On Saturday, BP Senior Vice President Bob Fryar said “the company funneled about 250,000 gallons of oil in the first 24 hours from a containment cap installed on the well” to a drilling ship on the ocean surface. “That operation has gone extremely well,” Fryar said at an Alabama news conference. “We are very pleased.” On CNN’s State of the Union, Allen rebuked Fryar, telling Candy Crowley that nobody “should be pleased as long as there’s oil in the water”:

ALLEN: We are making the right progress. I don’t think anybody should be pleased as long as there is oil in the water. They have been able to put a containment cap over the leak site, start to bring oil to the surface and start turning off the vents. Nobody should be pleased until the relief well is done.

Watch it:

“The facts are, there is oil on the beach,” Allen concluded. “We need to keep focusing on that. This is an insidious enemy attacking our shores. It’s holding the gulf hostage, basically.”

The effectiveness of the containment cap in limiting the flow of oil into the ocean is actually entirely unclear. Cutting the riser pipe may have increased the gusher, whose flow rate is unknown. The estimate of 500,000 to 850,000 gallons a day is just a lower bound estimate from before the riser pipe cut, the scientists who worked on the official Flow Rate Technical Group have explained. The live underwater video shows no apparent reduction in the oil spewing into the gulf.

BP has a long record of being “very pleased” with their failed efforts to stop the gusher and contain the spread of oil, which has now led to the closure of a third of the Gulf of Mexico, an area larger than the state of Florida:

May 17: “I’m really pleased we’ve had success now,” BP COO Doug Suttles says. “We’ve actually had what we call this riser insertion tube working more than 24 hours now.”

May 19: BP announces it’s “very pleased” with the performance of the insertion tube, as oil blankets Louisiana’s wetlands, fishermen are sickened, and the slick is caught by the loop current.

May 26: “As the admiral has mentioned, it’s disappointing, we do have oil ashore at nine different locations in the state of Louisiana,” Suttles says, before finding a silver lining. “But we still have no oil ashore in either Alabama, Mississippi, or Florida, which we’re very pleased about.”

May 27: “As I’ve mentioned before, the equipment actually has performed very well,” Suttles says about the top kill effort, which replaced the failed riser insertion tube. “We are very pleased with the performance of the equipment so far.”

May 28: “I’ve done this many, many times now and I can tell you that the battle offshore, we’re winning that battle,” Suttles claims. “It’s the least amount of oil that I’ve seen offshore since my very first flight, so I’m very, very pleased with the activity of the offshore team.”

May 29: “I’m very pleased to say the amount of oil on the surface of the sea continues to be reduced,” Suttles bizarrely claims, as BP abandons the failed “top kill” effort.

June 5: “Over the last 24 hours we’ve been able to collect 6,000 barrels of oil,” BP Senior Vice President Bob Fryar tells reporters in Mobile, AL, “so we’re very pleased with that operation.”

The Wonk Room is blogging and tweeting live from the Gulf Coast.

With a naiveté reminiscent of the Bush administration, BP officials are claiming that the apocalyptic failure of its deepwater exploratory rig was unforeseeable, unprecedented and inconceivable. On Sunday, BP press flack Steve Rinehart — hired from the Anchorage Daily News after a mega-spill from a damaged Prudhoe Bay BP pipeline in March 2006 — even evoked the “I don’t think anybody” excuse that was the hallmark of the Bush administration’s attempts to deflect blame for their catastrophes:

“I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now.” — BP spokesman Steve Rinehart [AP 5/2/10]

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.” — Condoleezza Rice [CNN, 5/16/02]

“The sort of occurrence that we’ve seen on the Deepwater Horizon is clearly unprecedented.” — BP spokesman David Nicholas [AP 4/30/10]

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded. And now we are having to deal with it and will.” — President George W. Bush [GMA, 9/1/05]

BP did not build containment devices before disaster because it “seemed inconceivable” the blowout preventer would fail. — BP spokesman Steve Rinehart [AP 5/2/10]

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we’ve encountered. I guess the other area that I look at, in terms of an area where I think we were faced with difficulties we didn’t anticipate was the devastation that 30 years of Saddam’s rule had wrought, if you will, on the psychology of the Iraqi people.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, 6/19/06

Just as there were warnings about terrorists using planes as bombs, the threat of hurricanes to New Orleans, and post-invasion violence in Iraq, the BP failure was entirely conceivable and foreseeable:

Failures of blowout preventers and actual blowouts are common. Between 1992 and 1998 there were 319 failures of blowout preventers found in US offshore drilling, an average of 45 a year. [MMS, 1999] Between 1992 and 2006 there were at least 39 blowouts off the US coastline, 38 of them in the Gulf of Mexico. [MMS, 7/07] From 2007 to 2009 there were 19 blowouts, all in the Gulf of Mexico. [MMS]

The largest accidental oil spill in history was a Gulf of Mexico exploratory rig blowout. On June 3, 1979, the exploratory well IXTOC I blew out and ignited, burning down the platform. Divers later activated the blowout preventer to no avail.The well continued to spill oil at a rate of 10,000 to 30,000 barrels per day until it was finally capped on March 23, 1980. [NOAA]

A major offshore blowout followed by a two-month spill occurred in 2009. In “one of Australia’s worst oil disasters,” a PTTEP oil rig blew out in the Montara oil field on August 21, 2009. Efforts to control the leaking rig set it on fire on November 1st, two days before the leak was finally plugged. Official estimates of the leak rate were five times higher than those of the oil company. [Wikipedia]

A ‘spill of national significance’ exercise in 2002 concerned a major rig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Adm. Thad Allen led a “spill of national significance” exercise in 2002 that dealt with the scenario of an oil rig exploding off the coast of Louisiana, with an “uncontrollable discharge” of oil that lasted for a month. These training exercises take place every three years as mandated by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, the most recent of which occurred in March, 2010.

On Sunday in Louisiana, President Barack Obama said that “the leak is unique and unprecedented.” (HT State of the Division)

USCG Cmdr. Adm. Thad Allen

The new commander of the BP-Halliburton oil disaster response believes significant amounts of oil will soon be hitting the fragile beaches and wetlands of the Gulf Coast. Admiral Thad Allen, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, was named today the “national incident commander” for the oilpocalypse unfolding from the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon exploratory rig on April 20. His appointment follows Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s declaration that the disaster is a “spill of national significance,” as the oil slick from the underwater gusher tripled in size in one day. Changing wind direction has meant, fortunately, that only the leading edges of the slick have reached the farthest reaches of Louisiana’s Mississippi Delta. In a press briefing this afternoon, Allen explained that the future location of the slick is “dependent on the weather,” but that the sheer volume of oil means that “it’s logical to assume” the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida will be hit:

There’s enough oil out there it’s logical to assume it will impact the shoreline. The question is when and where.

Allen said that the underwater sea of oil will keep growing until BP is able to cap it, a process that “could go for 45 to 90 days.” If oil continues to flow at current rates for that length of time, that would add up to about 90 million gallons of oil, on the scale of the largest oil spills in history. The winds are expected to shift, directing the spill towards the Mississippi and Alabama coasts over the next 72 to 96 hours. The extended network of floating booms being deployed and dispersants sprayed from C-130s will only mitigate, not stop, the oil’s impact.

Allen led a “2002 planning exercise in New Orleans for an oil spill in the Gulf Coast,” and is applying lessons learned from that exercise today. In 2005, Allen rose to public prominence when the hapless FEMA director Michael Brown asked him to take over the Hurricane Katrina response, a week after the global-warming-fueled storm had made landfall, killed thousands, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. It’s a good sign that Allen is being called in this time when this new fossil-industry disaster is just hitting our shores.