Nobody planned to implement the plan

Certainly such a thing is without precedent.

If U.S. officials had followed up on a 1994 response plan for a major Gulf oil spill, it is possible that the spill could have been kept under control and far from land.

The problem: The federal government did not have a single fire boom on hand.

The "In-Situ Burn" plan produced by federal agencies in 1994 calls for responding to a major oil spill in the Gulf with the immediate use of fire booms.

But in order to conduct a successful test burn eight days after the Deepwater Horizon well began releasing massive amounts of oil into the Gulf, officials had to purchase one from a company in Illinois.

When federal officials called, Elastec/American Marine, shipped the only boom it had in stock, Jeff Bohleber, chief financial officer for Elastec, said today.

Here is the same NOAA document on "In-situ" burning we linked to last week. (PDF) The "Required conditions" section is instructive.

To burn oil on water, four major conditions must be met:

1. The oil layer has to be thick enough to support combustion. Oil layers thinner than 1 to 2 mm lose too much heat to the water and cannot support combustion.

2. The ignition devices used must be hot enough and last long enough to ignite the oil.

3. The water-in-oil emulsion may not contain more than 30 to 50 percent water to ignite and support combustion.

4. To use currently available fire resistant booms, environmental conditions must be favorable: wind speed should be below 20 knots, and wave height should be below three feet.

Corollary 4-a. The currently available fire resistant booms must be freaking currently available.

I'm sorry if this seems repetitive but I'm going to keep harping on it. The more I read about ways in which this situation could have been contained or possibly avoided if BP and Mary Landrieu had spent more time preparing to do that and less time deceitfully arguing that there was no reason to, the angrier I'm going to get.

Furthermore I predict that what will eventually make me the angriest is the building conventional wisdom that we should, in Pat's words below this AZ post about more BP criminal behavior,

Focus on clean-up, safety, redundancy, and smarter production. That grounds the arguments heavily in a reality that "arrest everyone," while cathartic, ignores

I think, actually, the opposite is true. I think, by now, if we had arrested everyone involved in Bush's illegal wiretapping program, Obama wouldn't be institutionalizing the same procedures. I think if we had arrested everyone on Wall Street trading in dishonest conceptual derivatives maybe we wouldn't have to worry about the same reckless behavior repeating itself. Maybe if just once we really did decide it was time to hold someone accountable and arrest everyone, someone would finally learn something. We've tried using the suffering of the poor victims of these crises to "ground the arguments heavily in a reality" for generations now. It's time to start making somebody who matters bleed for the cause for a change.