It's been more than a week since British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform 53 miles southwest of the Louisiana coast in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico exploded and sank on April 20, leaving a breached wellhead bleeding an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil petroleum per day.
Eleven workers on the rig were killed in the explosion and subsequent fire. The gigantic oil slick created by the disaster has reached the coast line and threatens to become the nation's worst environmental disaster ever. More than a week passed before President Obama moved to address the disaster despite the clear evidence that BP and the Coast Guard were unable to stop the flow of oil and contain the spill.
Obama's delay in acting to put needed resources on the disaster site is being compared to President George W. Bush's tawdry response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. One big difference in the perception of the Bush and Obama responses to disasters in Lousiana, however, is the way the media has reported their respective delays.
For Bush, the cries of uncaring apathy began within hours of the commencement of the crisis. For Obama, very little has been said about his apparent unconcern until the last 48 hours. But by now it's become so obvious that even the New York Times had to take notice.
Doug Ross has assembled a superb pictorial timeline of the disaster and what Obama was doing during his days of ignoring the Deep Horizon oil spill disaster that seems certain to go into the history books as one of the worst ever in U.S. environmental history.
