After failure, frustration prevails

BOOTHVILLE, La. – There is still a hole in the Earth, crude oil is still spewing from it and there is still, excruciatingly, no end in sight. After trying and trying again, one of the world’s largest corporations, backed and pushed by the world’s most powerful government, can’t stop the runaway gusher.

As desperation grows and ecological misery spreads, the operative word on the ground now is, incredibly, August – the earliest moment that a real resolution could be at hand. And even then, there’s no guarantee of success. For the United States and the people of its beleaguered Gulf Coast, a dispiriting summer of oil and anger lies dead ahead.

And the Atlantic hurricane season begins Tuesday.

The latest attempt – using a remote robotic arm to stuff golf balls and assorted debris into the gash in the seafloor – didn’t work. On Sunday, as churches echoed with prayers for a solution, BP PLC said it would focus on containment rather than plugging the undersea puncture wound, effectively redirecting the mess rather than stopping it. Yet the new plan carries the risk of making the torrent worse, as top government officials warned Sunday.

“We failed to wrestle this beast to the ground,” said BP Managing Director Bob Dudley, doing the rounds of the Sunday talk shows.

As the oil washes ashore, crude-coated birds have become a frequent sight. At the sea’s bottom, no one knows what the oil will do to species like the newly discovered bottom-dwelling pancake batfish – and others that remain unknown but just as threatened.

Scientists from several universities have reported large underwater plumes of oil stretching for miles and reaching hundreds of feet beneath the Gulf’s surface, though BP PLC CEO Tony Hayward on Sunday disputed their findings, saying the company’s tests found no such evidence of oily clouds underwater.

“The oil is on the surface,” Hayward said. “Oil has a specific gravity that’s about half that of water. It wants to get to the surface because of the difference in specific gravity.”

Perhaps most alarming of all, 40 days after the Deepwater Horizon blew up and began the underwater deluge, hurricane season is at hand. It brings the horrifying possibility of wind-whipped, oil-soaked waves and water spinning ashore and coating areas much farther inland.

The spill is already the worst in American history. It has already released between 18 million and 40 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, according to government estimates.

“This is probably the biggest environmental disaster we’ve ever faced in this country,” White House energy and climate change adviser Carol Browner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

At some point this tipped, in the national conversation, from a destructive event into a calamitous, open-ended saga. And for the bruised and cantankerous American psyche, it could not come at a worse time.

“There are people who are getting desperate,” said the Rev. Theodore Turner, 57, at Mount Olive Baptist Church in Boothville, near where oil first washed ashore. Fishermen make up about a third of his congregation.

“And there are more getting anxious as we get further into the shrimping season and there is less chance they will recover.”