Interior Secretary Ken Salazar warned graduates of the Denver School of Science and Technology on Saturday that they will encounter challenges they can’t foresee even as he learned the biggest one of his federal career just got tougher.
He learned that the top-kill operation in the Gulf of Mexico — recently thought to have been succeeding — doesn’t appear to be working, and now plans are in motion to try the next idea to curb what has already become the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
“That’s what I do. That’s my challenge today,” Salazar told the students at the celebrated charter school that was one of three schools in the running to have President Barack Obama give a commencement address. “I am confident this problem will be solved.”
It was a mind-boggling, real-life illustration for the graduating seniors, all of whom have been accepted into colleges.
Just after Salazar assured the graduates that America would be better off once they applied their immense talents, he acknowledged in a brief discussion with reporters that the gulf oil gusher is still spewing crude.
“Right now we are evaluating a backup plan,” Salazar said.
The next step will be to attempt to use a pipe to cap the well and stop the flow of millions of gallons of oil into the gulf, Salazar said.
“We’ll keep staying at it until we get it solved,” he said. “We’re doing everything with the best minds in the world to get it solved.”
The school won the chance to have a Cabinet secretary deliver the commencement address through a contest sponsored by the White House. Obama chose to speak at a Michigan school, and Salazar was a consolation prize for DSST.
He told the graduates that regardless of their upbringing or their race, there wasn’t anything they couldn’t achieve.
He said he never imagined that one day he would be dealing with such weighty problems as the gulf spill after growing up with seven siblings on a farm with an outhouse and no phone in the San Luis Valley.
Growing up, he always thought he, too, would spend his life on a farm, where he once walked in fifth-generation hand-me-down shoes of different sizes.
Who would have thought that Obama, a skinny, mixed- race child raised by a single parent with a Muslim name, would achieve what he has. He said he has on occasion been in the Oval Office with Obama, staring at him and wondering:
“How did this happen?”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
