Misunderestimating the BP Oil Spill
In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, it took weeks before the public got a decent estimate for the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. BP claimed not to care (it was supposedly focused on stopping the oil, not estimating how much there was). And from the White House on down, government officials seemed downright incurious about getting an accurate figure out there. So for weeks, a placeholder estimate of 5,000 barrels per day was the official figure, even though pretty much everyone knew it was wrong. Ultimately, the figure turned out to be ten times higher.
Now we have some insight into what went wrong. An email released by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) recounts the back-and-forth between scientists trying to estimate the flow of oil and the people at the White House and other entities doing political damage control.
Basically, political damage control won out over accuracy in the form of persistent, and wrong under-estimations. Marcia McNutt, who was leading the government’s Flow Rate Technical Group, recounted her frustrations:
"I cannot tell you what a nightmare the past two days have been dealing with the communications people at the White House, DOI [Department of Interior], and the NIC [National Intelligence Council] who seem incapable of understanding the concept of a lower bound. The press release that went out on our results was misleading and was not reviewed by a scientist for accuracy. It was based on a brief report that Bill, Vic, and I had prepared, and the communications people “thought” that it reflected our results, but it didn’t because they don’t understand what a lower bound is. Bottom line: if you are at a university, do convince some of your best and brightest to go into science communication. Please. Let me give you a flavor of some of the “suggestions” I was getting from the NIC and from the communications people at the White House and DOI as recently as yesterday afternoon as to how to ”simplify” our bottom line..."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmcquaid/2012/01/23/misunderestimating-the-bp-oil-spill/
This story has been posted before, notably here http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002207295
It's interesting to see Forbes writing about it. The worm is turning.