Leadership and Crisis

by Bobby Jindal

  People assume that BP must have been better because after all, they’re in the private sector. But BP CEO Tony Hayward seemed to suffer from the same sense of hubris. On top of that, he had little sense of accountability. “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” he reportedly exclaimed to his fellow executives as the crisis unfolded. He seemed to downplay the realities of the situation at best and exhibit arrogance at worst. “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” he told reporters on one occasion. “The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” He was seemingly nonchalant about how the very way of life for tens of thousands of people in my state was at risk. Asked whether he was sleeping at night he replied, “Yeah, of course I am.” When he tried to offer apologies he messed that up, too. “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused to their lives,” he said famously. “There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do; I’d like my life back.” When workers complained of feeling ill from breathing oil fumes all day, Hayward brushed it off and managed to insult our cooking at the same time. He said that the workers were feeling sick possibly because of “food poisoning.” I don’t know what Hayward will do after he leaves BP, but let me make a bold prediction that he has no future in public relations or brand management.3

  Hayward obviously felt terribly inconvenienced by the oil spill. And he had little interest in hearing solutions the locals had in mind to deal with a disaster that his company had caused. During our second meeting together, Hayward came to my office, and he had a very specific mission: he wanted me to sign off on the use of subsea dispersants, chemicals that would disperse the oil near where the leak was occurring. I had no real authority here. BP could do this with the approval of the Coast Guard. But he wanted legal cover, so he pressed me to sign off on it. I said I first wanted him to show me the science that the dispersants would not have adverse affects on the Gulf. When I expressed to him the need for us to build sand berms along the coast to help keep the oil out of the marshes, he was completely dismissive. He deemed the berms as more important in protecting the state against hurricanes than oil. (He failed to grasp the concept that a hurricane surge would bring more oil deeper into our marsh, making these barriers critical protection for both oil and hurricanes.) He was so arrogant he didn’t even want to listen to me make the case. He lacked the common sense even to pretend to be interested in what I was saying. He was tone-deaf and clueless. I thought to myself, I can’t believe this guy runs a multi-billion dollar company. This guy would not succeed as a used car salesman.

  If the oil spill crisis teaches us one thing, it is that a distant, central command and control model simply didn’t work with the fast-moving and ever-changing crisis that was unfolding. Frankly, some of the best leadership and advice we got was from local leaders, like the parish presidents and fishermen. As far as I can tell, none of them has yet to win a Nobel Prize, but they know these waters. And some of the best ideas for cleanup came from locals.

  Because the federal government was failing to provide the boom we needed, we came up with creative ideas—Tiger dams, Hesco Baskets, sand-drop operations, and freshwater diversions. It was a local initiative that gave us one of the best techniques for cleaning up: vacuum trucks. The federal government was having workers clean the marsh grasses with the equivalent of paper towels. We thought of the bright idea of putting a large vacuum truck, like the kind that they use to clean Port-a-Potties, on top of a National Guard pontoon boat. They were highly effective in sucking up the oil.

  Another local innovation was the “jack up barge”—commonly used here to help the oil industry service rigs out in the water. The Coast Guard and BP couldn’t figure out how to rapidly deploy boom in response to specific oil sightings in marsh areas and to stretch their supplies instead of trying futilely to protect the entire coast, so Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungusser suggested that we use these barges that people could live on and supply them with lots of boom so response boats could stock up and go directly to oiled areas in the water in real time without having to come all the way back to the shore.

  In Grand Isle, they started using rigid pipe to act as a high water boom to help with the oil. There was such a void in the federal response—lack of boom, lack of approval on plans to use rocks and barges to stop the oil, to name a few—that they used this pipe to hold the oil back. It served as a barrier to protect vulnerable estuaries, and was yet another innovative use of ordinary oil field equipment. Simply put, working with locals we were able to use whatever we could get our hands on to stop oil from coming into our fragile marshes and waters. We did what the federal government just couldn’t: act quickly and efficiently to protect our shores. Unlike them, we were never satisfied with just doing nothing.

  We quickly discovered that the only way to get things done by either BP or the federal government was to go public. The national media was very helpful in this regard. When we asked for the Coast Guard to give us their plans for deploying and prioritizing boom to contain the oil spill, we heard nothing for more than a week. So we met with the parish presidents, and the next day we had our plans posted online. We went on TV and explained our plan, and suddenly there was some action. The federal government seemed to be motivated by the potential for bad media coverage but ... at least we were finally getting their attention.

  During the president’s second trip to Louisiana, on May 28, we were down in Grand Isle and were meeting with the parish presidents whose parishes were being affected by the spill. It was a strange presidential visit in that before the president arrived, a group of workers were bussed in to clean the beach before the president walked it. (As of this writing, as far as I know, the president has never actually seen heavy oil from the spill; my staff and I, however, went almost daily to show the world and the nation the true caliber of this disaster.) The meeting included local officials, but Billy Nungusser and St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro had to crash it, even though their parishes had been heavily affected by the oil. They showed up without an invite to represent their people. That’s Billy and Craig.

  Before the meeting broke up, President Obama singled out Billy and me and told us to stop going on television and criticizing him. “I go home every night and I see on TV people saying I’m not doing anything,” he said. “I don’t need to see you guys on CNN criticizing us.” For some reason he was particularly miffed that Billy was going on with Anderson Cooper. It was the oddest conversation. Actually, it was not really a conversation. It was more like a lecture. Before we had a chance to reply and explain that this seemed to be the only way to get federal action, the president adjourned the meeting. Again, the White House seemed to focus on the wrong things. I felt like we needed to be on a wartime footing against the oil, and the president was wondering, why is everybody criticizing me? The irony is that right after that exchange, someone from the White House staff came over to prepare us for the all important photo opportunity where the president would make remarks to the national press. The staff member was insistent that I stand next to the president. But before the photographers arrived, Florida Governor Charlie Crist edged me out of the way. I was happy to yield the ground.

  Billy was honest and open in his views on the failure of the federal government to adequately respond to the situation. At one point he had a conversation with Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry who was upset about his criticisms and asked him to tone them down in the meeting with the president. She said he was criticizing thousands of people in the Coast Guard, but Billy told her he was only criticizing her. At the end of the meeting they patched things up. The Coast Guard admiral later asked him for a hug. “Everyone needs a hug,” Billy told the admiral.

  Because of his frustration with the federal response, Mayor David Camardelle of Grand Isle pushed a plan to place rocks (temporarily) in western Barataria Bay to protect some of the most sensitive and productive fishing estuaries in the world. The idea was to narrow the passes and use va
cuum barges in the gaps to fight the oil from getting to our interior marshes. This defense would be especially important when the boom and skimmers were rendered ineffective by storm surges. To implement his plan, Camardelle needed the approval of the federal government. The president promised that he would get a call within hours about the plan. Weeks later they were still telling us to wait. The mayor was repeatedly told that his plan was on the verge of getting approved, so he actually had BP go buy and move the rocks. It wasn’t until July 6—weeks later—that we got an answer. It was no. And they offered no real alternative solutions.

  I will let the experts debate whether the plan was a good one or not. But the fact that they took forever to give him an answer and encouraged him to believe that the plan would be approved was ridiculous.

  It was enormously frustrating, and it was becoming a pattern. The federal government didn’t have an adequate plan, but kept stopping us from acting. Every time one of our requested defense measures was not provided by the federal government, we came up with an alternative—just to have those alternatives get shot down.

  The federal government seemed often more concerned about process than results. The vacuum barges were working very well, but on June 17 I had to go to Delta Marina in Plaquemines Parish to check on the barges which had been shut down by the Coast Guard because they needed “inspections and certifications.” There was heavy oil impact in Barataria Bay where vacuum operations had been working before these “inspections.” These barges had literally suctioned thousands of gallons of oil out of the marshes. Now, the federal government wanted to make sure that the barges were using the proper valves. We asked why the valves were so important. They explained that using the wrong valves might cause a little of the oil they were sucking up to drop BACK into the water! Timmy interrupted the meeting and said, “Wait a minute, you are concerned about the environmental impacts of a fraction of the oil these barges remove from the water seeping back in?” I would have laughed harder about the silliness of it all, but the stakes were too high. I demanded that the White House show a sense of urgency in getting these barges back to work, and was therefore furious to learn that the Coast Guard wasted several hours since they couldn’t find phone numbers for the barge companies. They didn’t realize that they and BP had approved each of the contractors; the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. Apparently they eventually realized the absurdity of the situation, but then they wanted the barges to return to port so they could count the lifejackets and fire extinguishers. We pleaded with them to allow the barges to work during the inspections, to have the inspectors go to them, but the feds refused. (I guess it made too much sense.) After bringing the barges back to port for twenty-four hours, they eventually allowed them to resume work without inspections.

  Perhaps the most iconic image of the oil spill was the workers, dressed in white Hazmat suits, wandering the coastline. But these workers were far less effective than they might have been because of federal regulations. When temperatures rose above 90 degrees (which they do approximately every day in Louisiana during the summer), workers were allowed to labor for only a fraction of an hour. News crews regularly caught them working for less than twenty minutes and then resting for the remainder of the hour under white tents that had been erected on the beaches. What is so frustrating about this is that at the same time the National Guard, employees of Louisiana’s Wildlife and Fisheries, and private contractors were working for eight to twelve hours every day, some with bulldozers and shovels. They got what the feds still didn’t: we were at war. You literally couldn’t have pulled these guys off their jobs to sit in tents. Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts got it right when he told a local reporter that it was time for the feds to get a war mentality to tackle the oil spill. “Katrina would be a perfect example of that. Another example is the war going on in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s hot, they’re on the sand, but soldiers don’t fight for ten minutes then say, ‘Timeout, we have to take our required OSHA break.’ It’s ridiculous.”4

  In another instance, we were building sand berms out by the Chandeleur Islands. The project had been approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, and we had started dredging. But we were told by the Interior Department that we were dredging in the wrong spot. They were wrong, and eventually we went public and suggested that the Department of the Interior needed to consult a map to see we were dredging within the area they approved. We even offered to replace the sand we were temporarily using—but they refused. Work began once again, but we lost precious time when they forced us to move equipment. Dredging had been shut down for almost a week because of the bureaucrats.

  Our problems in Louisiana were compounded by the fact that the Obama administration imposed a deepwater offshore drilling moratorium. Along the Louisiana coast fishermen and the energy industry have a long history of coexisting very well together. For example, in Morgan City for the past seventy-five years we’ve held a Shrimp and Petroleum Festival. When President Obama announced a moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling, it was devastating news for our state. Depending on its length, the moratorium risked killing thousands of jobs and resulting in a loss of millions in wages each month. The moratorium would do nothing to clean up the Gulf of Mexico, but it could have a severe impact on our economy. Just as the threat of expanding cap and trade, higher tax rates, and the cost of health care reform are causing businesses to refrain from investing and creating jobs, the administration appeared oblivious to the impact their actions would have on private sector jobs. The companies would likely absorb the losses and try to maintain their staffs and equipment if they were assured the moratorium would be short-lived, and indeed many are trying to do just that. Businesses need predictability when making massive investments of capital. The moratorium did the opposite.

  When it came to the moratorium, there seemed to be a disconnect between the White House and reality. As of this writing, the courts have ruled twice against the administration, with one judge even calling their actions “arbitrary” and “capricious.” The judge said that the government’s action “does not seem to be fact-specific” and that the “government’s hair-splitting explanation abuses reason and common sense.” When another judge asked the lawyers for the federal government whether they “considered the severe economic harm that befalls the oil industry and the workers in the oil industry as a result of the six-month moratorium,” the answer came back: NO.5

  We had regular daily talks with the White House, and it was usually Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to the president, who participated. When the president first announced a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf, I mentioned to Jarrett on the phone how the moratorium could cost Louisiana thousands of jobs. Jarrett said that no, the effects would not be long lasting because there was a lot of oil under the Gulf and the oil rigs weren’t going anywhere. “There will be oil there tomorrow,” she told us. Senator Mary Landrieu and I had to explain to her that some of the rigs rent at $500,000 a day, and that an unpredictable moratorium could alter companies’ long-term plans. If they couldn’t pump oil and were sitting idle for at least six months, the rigs would simply be moved to another location. (And indeed, some of the oil rigs have been redeployed to Africa as of this writing.) Jarrett didn’t seem to understand that the rigs couldn’t be turned on and off with a switch—and that global competition for the production of oil is very real. The idea that she could so confidently predict the economic impact of the drilling moratorium and not actually realize that oil rigs would simply be moved was stunning.6

  Along with the official moratorium on deep-water drilling, independent oil operators began to complain that the Obama administration had a de facto moratorium in place on shallow-water drilling. Before the spill, federal authorities were regularly issuing permits to drill in shallow water. After the spill, the issuing of permits was reduced to a trickle. Most of these shallow-water operators were not a part of “big oil”—they were small, independent producers who could lose everythin
g. Their operations in, say, 200 feet of water had nothing to do with what happened at Deepwater Horizon. But a de facto moratorium was imposed.

  The White House certainly knew that the moratorium could cost thousands of jobs. And they went ahead anyway.7 When I raised my concerns about the moratorium with President Obama, he assumed that I was simply parroting these words because I was supposed to say them. “I understand you need to say all of this, I know you need to say this, that you are facing political pressure,” he said. He didn’t seem to understand that for us in Louisiana, this was the reality on the ground. This was about people losing their jobs. He responded by saying that national polls indicated that people supported a ban. The human element seemed invisible to the White House.

  Why was the decision-making so bad? Were they blinded by ideology? Ideology may have played a part. But even more important (and more troubling) to me was the simple fact that the Obama administration was making big decisions about an industry they knew little about—and they didn’t seem particularly concerned about the consequences. For example, they touted the fact that they secured money from BP to compensate oil rig workers for their loss of pay as a result of the moratorium. But they didn’t think about everyone else who would suffer, including suppliers, caterers, shop owners, and support personnel. They boldly went about making major decisions without really understanding the consequences of what they were doing.

  The Obama administration tried to cloak the moratorium with a report based on expert opinion that the safety situation in the Gulf required a moratorium. But after the report was issued, eight of the fifteen experts named said the moratorium language was not even in the draft report they had reviewed, and that they disagreed with the moratorium. They went on to say that a suspension of drilling would have a negative impact on the economy. And some even noted that the moratorium really would not do anything to make the Gulf safer.8 Some experts have even noted the moratorium could make drilling in the Gulf less safe as the most modern equipment may be the first to leave.