WASHINGTON — Hours after news broke that the offshore rig Deepwater Horizon was in trouble, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered a team of top aides to the Gulf Coast with instructions to call him hourly with updates from the scene.
Dispatched without even a toothbrush, the aides would “get off the call after a 20-minute update and spend the next 40 minutes trying to figure out whatever information we could before calling him back again,” according to one account by spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff, who had been sent to the site along with Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes.
Aides say the early urgency with which Salazar sought information about the rig fire seemed to reflect a “sixth sense” about the seriousness of the unfolding crisis.
But he may have sensed as well what is now clear to just about everyone else: The spill is likely to be a defining moment for the interior chief and former Colorado senator — one that could either buoy an already stellar rise to national prominence or turn the department he heads into a governmental poster child for the worst environmental disaster in two decades.
Since the massive offshore rig exploded April 20 and sank two days later, Salazar has been the Obama administration’s public face of energy and determination — scolding oil companies, briefing coastal state governors, and visiting the gulf five times in four weeks.
“I want to tell you how proud I am of you and how pleased I am the president appointed you to this position because your character, your integrity are unquestioned,” U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana lawmaker whose state is perhaps most at risk from the spill, told Salazar at a hearing last week on Capitol Hill.
But such glowing assessments are increasingly rare.
Salazar, 55, spent much of his testimony that day conceding that the agencies he oversees had badly mismanaged their oversight role. And in recent days, questions have begun to mount.
Last week, prominent scientists charged that the federal government has been complicit for weeks in allowing oil giant BP to conceal the true size of the spill that has been gushing 5,000 feet below the gulf’s surface.
And when Salazar promised Congress that stricter rules for undersea drilling would be proposed by month’s end, he effectively conceded that current regulations could have been much tougher, including better oversight over cementing procedures and standards for blowout preventers, the supposedly fail-safe device that failed.
Environmentalists and some scientists, in fact, charged that Salazar and the Obama administration viewed a robust offshore drilling effort as a bargaining chip in the larger debate over the nation’s energy future — a counterweight to criticism that Salazar was too tough on onshore drilling and the trade-off necessary to pass a sweeping climate-change bill in the Senate this year.
It was a dangerous gamble, they say, given that the stakes of an accident from deepwater wells are so high.
“There’s onshore Ken Salazar and there’s offshore Ken, and they’re completely different. Onshore, you definitely couldn’t say he’s just an industry shill. But offshore, absolutely,” said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biodiversity, a fierce critic of the Interior Department’s regulatory failures when it comes to deepwater drilling.
“He definitely is much more aggressive and cavalier about offshore drilling,” Suckling said.
Salazar said he sought reforms but didn’t have time to complete them.
“We inherited a mess,” he said. “This department for the last eight years had become a rubber-stamp agency that issued leases to oil and gas companies without appropriate reviews, and that’s true with respect to both the onshore and the offshore.
“We had moved mountains to get to where we were on April 19 and will continue to move mountains because of the horrific accident on April 20th.”
Ghost of Katrina
In many ways, Salazar’s personality and management style make him the man for the moment, one in which the Obama administration is anxious to avoid the mistakes made by President George W. Bush and his team after Hurricane Katrina, when it appeared that many in the federal government fiddled while New Orleans drowned.
Rather than delegating, Salazar has made a point of being directly involved in even the minute details of the cleanup effort and frantic search for a means of capping the gushing undersea well — so much so that in his recent visit to Capitol Hill, more than one lawmaker publicly noted how exhausted he looked.
A glance at his public schedule shows that on a single day — April 29 — Salazar met with BP officials at a command center in Houston, consulted with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, received instructions from President Barack Obama to recommend new offshore safety measures within 30 days, announced the emergency inspection of all deepwater rigs, and then flew back to Washington for a late- night meeting with oil and gas industry officials, where he cajoled them to join the response effort.
“When the chief executive of BP, Tony Hayward, knows it’s me on the line, I get a response,” Salazar said, explaining the pace of the past four weeks in a recent interview. “When I push them on questions, I get the answers. When I tell them I want the best scientists in the world to have a seat at the table to review what they are doing so they don’t screw it up, they will do it.”
Yet, judgment of the accident and Salazar’s role will only be partly shaped by what’s happened since the blowout, and Salazar has also been left with the increasingly delicate task of explaining the failure of his own regulators while still preserving his credibility as the tough leader — the “new sheriff,” he famously said nine days after entering office — who can set things right.
The interior head drew criticism from industry advocates almost immediately for pulling back on on the Bush administration’s go-go attitude toward drilling on land, but scientists within the agency that regulates offshore oil — the Minerals Management Service — say that wasn’t the case offshore.
Sixteen months into Salazar’s tenure, managers who had aggressively pursued offshore leasing and suppressed concerns over environmental impacts were still in place, said a senior MMS scientist, who asked not to be identified over concerns of retaliation.
“Nothing changed here when Salazar started,” he said. “You have people with a very pro-development ideology guiding and making decisions about environmental analysis, concluding that there are no significant impacts when all the scientists think there are.”
Plenty of promises
During his testimony last week on Capitol Hill, Salazar promised that will soon change, and vowed to fire MMS managers who ignored scientific concerns. He asked the National Academy of Engineers to help with the investigation into the accident on the Deepwater Horizon, and the head of MMS’s offshore drilling program will retire at the end of the month.
But critics say that’s a convenient change of tune, and Salazar has to take some responsibility for the aggressive approach to offshore drilling that occurred under his watch.
In one case, for example, a former BP contractor who worked on the construction of the Atlantis — one of the world’s biggest oil platforms and which is operating in the gulf — told Interior Departent officials that the rig didn’t have up-to-date engineering documents or the necessary diagrams showing the crew how its components worked, potentially disastrous in case of an accident.
Salazar said his department is investigating the rig, but a long document outlining the problems was sent nearly a year ago both to Interior Department lawyers and to Salazar.
BP officials say Atlantis is safe and has the necessary documentation to operate.
The biggest test may still be to come for the Interior Department head, experts say, as the scope of the spill grows and oil begins to contaminate beaches, marshes and coastline.
“This is a huge test for him,” said Julian Zelizer, a political scientist at Princeton University. “Most Americans don’t follow what Cabinet officials do on a day-to-day basis. But when there is a crisis, that’s when Americans see a lot of you.
“If this isn’t stopped soon, there could be a tipping point where people start asking, ‘Why isn’t the administration, now that this is happening, being more firm and resolute?’ That’s when Salazar could really come under fire,” Zelizer said.
Michael Riley: 303-954-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com
Hands-on approach
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been directly involved in the gulf oil-spill cleanup. A look at his public schedule for April 29, a week after the rig sank:
• Met with BP officials at a command center in Houston.
• Consulted with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
• Received instructions from President Barack Obama to recommend new offshore safety measures within 30 days.
• Announced the emergency inspection of all deepwater rigs.
• Flew back to Washington for a late-night meeting with oil and gas industry officials to urge them to join the response effort.
