>> thank you. good morning. good morning. there you are. thank you for those kind words and your outstanding leadership of the office of justice program. it is a pleasure to stand with you this morning and join you in welcoming so many of our colleagues and critical partners to this conference. i would like to recognize the great work of our co-sponsors from the department of defense and homeland security to bring such a wide range of stakeholders together here today. from the federal powers to policy experts, researchers and front line practitioners, each of you is an essential part of the incident response community. each of you has a perspective that will enrich our understanding of the issues at the center of this conference. as you move through this week's ambitious agenda each of you has not only the power but the

opportunity to strengthen our nation's ability to prevent, respond to and recover from critical incidents wherever and whenever they occur. in addition to providing an invaluable forum for exchanging ideas, this conference also reinforces the ongoing collaboration between law enforcement responder's hand cabinet level agencies and administrators, researchers, policymakers and members of the responder community at every level. i believe it is especially fitting we come together this week as we approach the tenth anniversary of the most devastating terrorist attack ever carried out against the united states. it is appropriate we assembled just across the river from one of the targets that al qaeda struck on that terrible day. as national leaders in the incident response field i know there's not a single person in this room who has not reflect

that life on the unspeakable events of 9/11 or the lessons they carry for men and women in our line of work. just as we have all been inspired by the heroism from first responders and ordinary citizens we have also fought about the things that went right and what might have been done differently. one thing is clear. we have come a long way in the last decade. we have seen break through technological advances and more effective communication platforms and techniques. in spite of the improvements and the innovations that marked the last ten years it is important to remember in those crucial first seconds after an incident is reported even the most advanced technology is just a tool. it is the individual who wields the pool, federal responder who ensures public safety and saves lives. that is why gatherings like this are important. they give us a chance to showcase the capabilities at our

disposal as we work to shape and reinforce a multi jurisdictional coordinated approach critical in response. i am proud of the role our nation's department of justice continues to play in advancing these efforts and the essential work we are leading to ensure an effective response from emergency regimes like industrial accidents and natural disasters like your earthquake and hurricane that put east coast responders through last week and of course terrorist acts as well. our commitment to addressing these challenges run much deeper than the components like the national security division, the fbi and the atf. less visible but no less important are the departments that build the capacity of the justice community to respond to and recover from incidents of all types by investing and supporting research, providing training opportunities, administering grants and direct assistance to part airs at every

level. these partnerships not only form the backbone of our response capabilities in communities across the country but also play an essential role in the work we do at the federal level. the national institute of justice research development new equipment to the performance standards and testing activities that ensure the tools used by responders are safe and effective and every step along the way we will rely on your feedback. we depend on your engagement and we need your help. i am grateful that you have always been ready to provide it. this was especially clear last year when in response to the interagency boards for equipment standardization and interoperable the national institute of justice helped spearhead efforts to develop new strategies and standards for equipment designed to protect law enforcement personnel from chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear hazards.

we have all been encouraged that nij research is address this not merely by writing a letter or commissioning a study but by taking direct action, convening a group of stakeholders that range from scientists and engineers to law enforcement responders themselves to publishing a new set of equipment standards that met the requirement of iab. we are working to ensure new tools are available for purchase by a grants administered by dhs. they stepped up and solved the problem. this reflects the focus of nij researchers, to address gaps in our technological capability and reinforces commitment to broadbased constructive engagement by justice department efforts. in the same spirit i am pleased to report their taking new steps to work with law enforcement

partners implementing critical policy updates and leveraging new technologies to detect and prevent possible terrorist acts. at the center of this is the network of partnerships lori mentioned. agencies in washington and our counterparts at state, local and tribal levels moving in to national specific activity reporting initiative. n nsiis the responsibility of extraordinary leadership by the members of the global justice information sharing initiative and our many partners including partnerships with establish national capacity for gathering, documenting the legal process in and sharing suspicious activity reports that we receive every day from law enforcement officials through security organizations and members of the general public. we are connecting the dots more quickly and effectively than ever before. as we have seen all too often

specifically on september 11th and the aftermath of hurricane katrina the fact is in times of crisis even the best information is useless if responders are unable to share it broadly and to share it immediately. that is why over the last two years the department of justice has taken an increasingly active role in helping to ensure the communication needs of federal, state and tribal law enforcement agencies are match in a cumbersome jurisdictional barriers are broken down. thanks to the leadership of associate attorney general and assistant attorney general robinson and her colleagues and the national institute of justice and a director left and and his staff. we have a partnership with the department of homeland security and commerce opening a series of discussions and turning the public safety network and future of the block. let me be very clear. as long as i am attorney-general we will continue to advocate

meaningful, affordable access to the radio spectrum when and where needed. this is a priority. for as long as it takes we will continue to bring policymakers together with leaders from law-enforcement and broader public safety community and telecommunications with access to the resources that we need. in spite of the recent progress we face especially in a time of growing demand and limited budgets your work has never been more difficult. no question it has never been more important and threat to our national security and public safety continues to grow and evolve need to bring strategies and capabilities and technological tools into the twenty-first century, has never been greater. already the collaborative approach that was adopted is showing sign of progress by nsi and reasonable fusion of training facilities like the fbi hazard -- and efforts to ensure

officer safety that lori talked about. we developed important innovation that achieved significant results by working together. i am not yet satisfied. we can never afford to become complacent. as we look to the future we must continue to cooperate to raise awareness about the fact the we can fight crime off against the homeland more reliably and protect fellow citizens and first responders more effectively by ensuring public safety offices have access to the latest technologies and information sharing techniques available. significant obstacles remained but i am confident of the work that each of these people does every day will bring these efforts to the next level. this morning let us renew our commitment to increase cooperation and collaboration. let us seize the opportunity to expand our circle of partners

and engage more researchers and practitioners and policymakers in this important work. as a result of this expertise of everyone in this room i think we are on the right path and as we look over the chronic cannot help but feel optimistic about our ability to move forward and build on the record of progress that has helped to establish. thank you once again for everything you continue to do and the work you are helping to lead every day. i am honored to stand with you and care of you as partners and i look forward to all that we must and will accomplish for the people and the nation we are critical to serve. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, attorney general eric holder and assistant

attorney general robinson. thank you for speaking with us today. that shows the commitments you make as first responders and certainly to protecting the nation. i would like to switch gears back again and ask the chief to come up but before i do i would like to ask if there's anybody in the audience who responded to the attacks on the pentagon or the world trade center in pennsylvania if you could stand and be recognized. [applause] on behalf of the nation i would like to thank you for the service you provided. we honor the work you have done for us and for the nation.

dealing with homeland security -- i would like to introduce robert ingram who will read a letter from president george bush in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. and after that i would like to make some embarrassing comments about the service he has provided the country as we move through our agenda. chief? >> thank you. good morning. i have to tell you i was surprised and humble when i was asked to read this letter in front of this group. i am happy to do it. represent the emergency responders and military personnel and civilians who lost their lives on 9/11 or were seriously injured or those who continue to do so to protect our

freedom. greetings to those gathered in national harbour, maryland for the technologies for critical incident preparedness conference. nearly ten years ago terrorists took nearly 3,000 lives in the worst attack on our soil since pearl harbor. it was a day of unspeakable tragedy america can never forget and a day of heroism and hope because of our nation's citizens and first responders. in our darkest hour, their sacrifice inspired our country and revealed the true character of america. generous, brave and always prepared to serve the cause of righteousness. a decade after 9/11 america has a vastly upgraded network of homeland defenses, revamped intelligence community, and new technologies and resources to protect our country. we have a strong coalition

committed to combating terror, new programs to lift the suffering and hopelessness that give rise to extremism and terror, and a commitment to work toward a world in which children grow up with hope, freedom and peace. most importantly the united states is blessed to have men and women who willingly put the welfare of the nation before themselves. as long as we have guardians of such character and courage of america will always be in good hands. laurie and i thank you for your country and serve your fellow citizens. we send our best wishes for productive conference. may god bless you and continue to bless america. president george bush. [applause] >> as he steps down i just want to say thank you for all the

work the chief has done in the past ten years strengthening the homeland security enterprise. he is a true national resource and if you have the opportunity in the next few days to pick his brain about things we are doing well and could continue to do better please take the time. not often you can find a man of his quality, commitment, not only in new york city but the nation. thank you for everything you do. i am going to move on now and we are going to change over and prepare for our first session on the deepwater horizon oil spill. there are a couple housekeeping issues i would like to raise. first is the conference sessions will take place on this level of the hotel. our exhibit hall will be open after this morning's session as located one level down. i hope you are able to see the vendors and demonstrations that are being provided as we think about the research development

we are doing in dod and doj and dhs that how we can meet your particular needs. is a lovely day outside so feel free to take a few moments to visit the outdoor vehicle area. literally go kick the tires. you will find command vehicles and other vehicles you might find of interest as you start to think about future replacements. we are hoping for lively discussions. part of the value of a session like this is the knowledge you can bring to your home jurisdiction. there are microphones set up for your use. feel free to use them. again, this is critically important to how we learn. a slight change in tomorrow's schedule. the secretary of homeland security, my boss's boss will be speaking at 9:00 a.m.. this is in order for her to be able to fly up to deal with

hurricane damage. the conference was important enough she wanted to make sure she spoke here before she went. so 9:00 tomorrow morning. in addition, as you think about tomorrow night i urge you to take advantage of the shuttle service we have running to the national 9/11 pentagon memorial. details of the memorial and transportation are located in the agenda and there are folks ready to help you. if you haven't gone, i urge you to. as you think about what you do every day and protecting your communities in the homeland it is important to remember sacrifices others have made for us. i would like to invite the presenters of yesterday's session beyond a deepwater horizon oil spill. a discussion of lessons learned and future risks and potential responses. i would like you to take the

stage if you could. while we are dealing with this, we all saw the devastating effect of the deepwater horizon oil spill. thank you. this session will allow for a discussion of lessons learned and best practices from the incident particularly in regards to the ways to prepare for environmental disasters of such magnitude. the panel will be moderated by admiral james watson research as director of prevention policy for marine safety, security and stewardship for the u.s. coast guard. thank you for being here. the admiral has led a career that is dedicated to protecting and preserving our nation's environment. his previous assignments include chief of staff of the seven coast guard district in miami, florida and chief of the office of budget programs in the office

headquarters. other assignments included command officer of the marine safety office in miami, executive office in savannah, georgia and staff engineer for marine technical and hazardous materials division at coast guard headquarters. please join me in welcoming admiral watson to discuss the deepwater horizon oil spill general session. thank you for being here. [applause] >> thank you very much. this is going to be a terrific panel, i think. i feel wonderful to be with a distinguished group like yourselves. america's first responders and law enforcement professionals have long been very close to me

in my career and in my various assignments throughout the country. the topic today, the deepwater horizon response, certainly wouldn't have been as successful without the cooperation not just of federal agencies as we will have some spokesman here today for but also the states of louisiana, mississippi, alabama, texas, florida and all of the counties and cities located along the gulf coast. this was all of the government response and quite a few responders from private industry as well. i think you are going to enjoy our presentation. with me today is director sandy

davis, actually director of the office of homeland security and emergency preparedness in louisiana which is near shreveport, retired assistant chief of shreveport fire department, chairman of fema region 6, certified louisiana emergency manager, and he has been married 38 years and has three children and six grandchildren. we're really glad to have him here to represent that cross-section adjustments and. also with me today is captain pat keenan, supervisor of salvage and diving of naval systems command. patch has 30 years in the u.s. navy and has been conducting salvage diving, pollution abatement, and he does this

world wide. his responsibility literally around world to wherever and navy needs that unit and i can tell you also that supervisor of salvage is on call 24/7 to the coast guard or the epa to assist in any oil spill that requires special services. just as a side note, pat and i responded to the haiti earthquake just prior to the deepwater horizon incident in 2010. his team did a terrific job restoring port services in port-au-prince which enabled the world to bring food and critical supplies to those desperate people following that earthquake. and finally, director david webster homes is from the office

of response and restoration, national oceanographic and atmospheric administration. dave and i go way back. he was a coast guard officer for 27 years and we served together. he was in charleston, i was in savannah. we had a few shared experiences down there. prior to that he was vice president and senior operations manager under general dynamics and he has been at the office of restoration for a number of years and was very much involved with thewater horizon. >> if i could have my first slide please. this is the deepwater horizon. it suffered a catastrophic explosion which was the result of a blowout on the sea bottom.

as the rig personnel were trying to secure the well that they had just thrilled which was normal practice, this is a drilling rig for oil exploration. when oil was discovered, that hole in the bottom is normally filled with concrete and secured for have long as -- as long as the oil production company wanted to be secured as long as there's a reservoir of oil down there and been a production unit to that site and go back down into that wealth, breaking concrete and having the capacity and equipment to delivers that oil to a refinery. at this stage of the game they had just discovered the reservoir. it was a good well.

unfortunately we have all seen the old scenes of the blowout in eastern texas. we had a blowout from the bottom of the gulf of mexico. about a mile deep. the nearest point of land was just a little less than 50 miles away at the south pass of the mississippi river delta and about 100 miles from alabama and mississippi. this was pretty far out at sea and these crewmen were involved in the worst part of the tragedy. 11 members of the crew of the deepwater horizon perished in the explosion. the rest of the crew evacuated in life rafts. some dove into the water. several of them were rescued by a supply boat that was nearby.

then all of these other vessels came out and tried to put the fire out which raged for several days until the rig which had broken loose from its position over top because of the failure of the electrical system couldn't dynamically positioned it any longer. it eventually collapsed to the damage of the fire and that adrift situation that it was in and went to the bottom. at that point thee will contents are spilling out of the riser pipe that is no longer connected to the platform. it is no longer -- the fire is extinguished because it has fallen down to the bottom of the

sea. and we begin to see a significant oil spill. this was near the end of april of 2010. the responders initially were primarily the coast guard. 100 miles offshore. the oil spill response organizations, any oil drilling company is required to have on call as part of their commitment to the u.s. government when they sign on to a leak of these drilling sites offshore. in the gulf of mexico, it is pretty well equipped for that response because they have quite a few are sure willing -- drilling operations and production platforms. there are thousands of wells in

the gulf of mexico. in this particular case there was a tremendous amount of oil. ultimately this incident put some two hundred million gallons of crude oil. some of that was a gaseous mixture into the environment. many of you saw firsthand what that site looked like because after a few weeks the video of the actual site on the bottom of the sea was being televised. that became a personal involvement for a lot of people in america. for those of us that were on the front lines, i arrived about a week after this phase of it,

once the rig had collapsed. it was initially the deputy federal coordinator, and about june 1st became the federal coordinator on scene, july 15th they finally secured well with a containment device that was put on top of the blowout preventer that was part of the technical failure that occurred here. for those of us on the front lines, needless to say, this was a difficult period because we had a new oil spill every minute every day and for many of us that have a background in this kind of response that was a bit

unusual. typically you have an exxon valdez event with a ship runs aground and they take a short or a pipeline, even a pipeline you can typically secure the valve and stop the source of the oil. here we went for 88 days without being able to secure a source of the oil. that was a huge technological challenge in itself. in the meantime all of the normal things you do in response to and oil spill were going on at full bore because we had millions of gallons of oil coming to the surface. ..

>> the green area better represents the maximum extent of the oil in all of the days of the oil spill. anyone day did not cover all of that, that's depicted there, but as you can see there were days when the current took it down near the coast of florida. there were other days where it went over the galveston, texas. and the biggest impacts on the

shoreline where the blue areas are, and that's hundreds of miles of shoreline. and the type of shoreline that you have down in louisiana, mississippi and alabama varies, but about half of it is a marshy kind of shoreline associated like you would expect the delta of any river. of course, this is the mississippi river so it's a huge amount of very shallow marshland. very rich in shrimp and crab and crawfish, and all the wonderful things that you eat when you go down to new orleans. and then as you move east, you get into nice sandy beaches around pensacola, orange beach, and off of mobile there, gulf island. and very popular in the

summertime. of course, springtime for the kits coming down out of college. so these were areas that were ideas being threatened in two ways. one, because of the terrific diversity and richness of the seafood and the natural resources, and, too, because of the economics associated with these beach areas. down in the corner there of the slide you see the pie chart. in the oil spill, there's going to be some ultimate fate of the oil. and we all know this, and in this case since it was so far out at sea, actually a very small amount of it, and percentagewise, got to the

shore. the vast amount of it actually just disperses. that's a tough concept i think for people to understand, but it's mixed with the natural gas and so a large part of that gas and oil that reaches the surface, especially after it is stirred up in the ways, simply goes up into the atmosphere. another large part of it is just left to nature, will get kind of consumed by, especially in a rich, warm body of water like the gulf of mexico, by the normal microbes in the water, the tiniest living organisms in the world are in the city, and particularly in the warm seas. and they consumed oil.

it ultimately all gets turned into carbon dioxide. so anytime you're pulling any oil out of the reservoirs that is trapped into, in nature, even if you burn in your car or if it gets consumed by the microbes or get sent to a landfill, it all ultimately is going to turn in to see u2. and that's probably what happened to most of the oil. we actually is disbursements to try to speed up that process because that breaks down the oil slick that would otherwise occur on the surface and be very hard for that natural process to do a good job on before it reached the shore. now, we also burned the oil on the surface. and i'll show you some pictures of that.

these were just some diagrams that showed all the various activities that were going on. we also recovered quite a bit with surface vessels, using booms and skimmers, which are weird type devices where the oil goes into the top of a pile them -- pump, and then you try to keep the seawater out and just recover the oil off the surface. by far the most loyal that was actually recovered that had escaped from the well itself was due to the subsea operations, that was at first using a probe type of device that went into the fallen riser, and then later on after we cut that riser off we put a containment system on

top of the oil spill and recovered some oil there. onto two different vessels picked one that could actually process, separate the gas from the oil so that we could safely bring that recovered oil back to shore, and it was actually usable oil. the other rig that was used in that process could not process the oil, and so it had a huge flyer -- flyer on the stern of the ship and simply burned it up as it was brought to the surface. up there in the upper left corner, you see our vessels of opportunity. and there were thousands of vessels in the local area. most of them fishing vessels but

a lot of supply boats and even recreational vessels that were used in the response. this response was not unlike something that you might have read about in history. when the british had to send the fleet to rescue the british army, it was about on the size of that, and he was going out everyday literally thousands and thousands of vessels and crews. debris equipped -- they weren't equipped with a type of gear you need to handle oil. they had left communications with the coast guard and with the other oil spill responders. there had to be barges to manage what they recovered from the surface, and then they of course had to be safely returned to port. most of them each day because they really didn't have the type of onboard accommodations to stay out night after night.

we did have a small fleet of about maybe 50 vessels, as long as there was a threat of hurricane, that could stay out on a week or two week long period as long as their food and fuel held out, which we kept out on the site. they recovered the most significant amount of the oil that came up. you also see in the picture aircraft. aircraft were used mostly for identifying where the oil well or -- the oil was on and given day. this was using conjunction with satellite information that was refined actually during this spill by the various agencies that were helping us respond in our command post. and then using that information

that was distributed about a 7:00 meeting, then the flights would go up and we get back actual images and geographic locations. then the vessels will be directed to where the oil was. and we also used aircraft or aerial applications of that this person that i mentioned. and by the way, i brought in a little tip of the dispersant. this was the correct, 9500 has been used for many, many years in oil spill response. we use quite a bit of it during this spill, and i think it actually will continue to be a very important tool for oil spill response. and then we actually used remotely operated vehicles. these are tethered, electric propulsion submarines, unmanned

that could operate a mile below the seat. and it applied the dispersants directly on the oil discharge site. and that had two purposes. want to do typically what dispersants do, which is to try to break up the oil into minute enough pieces for the biological process to start working as soon as possible. and, number two, we had a lot of people working directly above this well. and as you saw in my first picture, that fire is what caused the death of those 11 people. we were terribly afraid that these highly volatile gases that come out of a well, just natural

gas, was going to reach out and ignited the condition, even without the rig there, just bubbling up. and, in fact, the volatile organic compounds were being measured every minute year and there was plenty of times when people who were working had to take cover. and we found the dispersants were very effective at reducing the volatile organic compounds that were coming out of the well right into the city. it was worse when they were perfectly calm weather. it was less hazardous to the people actually when there was a nice breeze blowing. so that was one thing that we were constantly concerned about, was human safety. i want to mention that there was actually a very, very good safety record. as you all know, as first responders that's your highest

concern while you are dealing with whatever the emergency is. the last thing you want to do is to have some of your own people injured or killed. in this case we had about 44,000 people responding on a typical day. and that's a lot of people to be under your command, from a safety concern. so we spent a lot of time giving them as it is mentors training, making sure they have the right equipment, doing things like controlling the volatile organic compounds out at the site, being very careful what, what materials they used to clean their equipment. the liquids that were used back and actually remove hardened tarry oil from the side of a boat or the equipment that is used for skimming in itself can

actually make people sick. so we had a lot of concern for that. fortunately, the oil itself, once it drifted for 50 or 100 miles, really had very few volatile organic compounds or hazardous vapors left in it. so it was, the cleaning materials that were our biggest concern. this was our federal response organization, and i want to emphasize, of course we had an organization that was very substantial that was not federal. the response that we have in this country to an oil or hazardous materials incident is

a federal obligation. the national contingency plan is different than the federal response plan. now, this is a system of response that is designed specifically for oil and hazardous materials. obviously, starts with the president of the united states. secretary of homeland security is the principal federal official. and in this particular case, we had a national incident commander. many of you may recall admiral thad allen was the national incident commander. he was in an interesting situation because he had been a, not of the coast guard, retired but he retained the title. the nrt stands our national response team. and they were stood up in washington, and in a region that was affected, it was in both the region six and region four. regional response areas.

and then of the federal on-scene coordinator, is the federal official on scene there. to actually organize the response on the ground in conjunction with the responsible party which in this case was bp, as well as the states. in this case texas, louisiana, mississippi, alabama, florida. and as you can see we set up for incident command posts with incident commanders there who work directly with me in those different areas. and mobile serve as an incident command post for both mississippi and alabama and the florida peninsula. and our concept of operations was basically hit it where ever

it was. and that response broke down to offshore, basically of the well site, and then nearshore to try to keep it from coming onto the beaches, and then as the last resort to recover the oil from the beaches and the marshes. these are again some of the techniques and procedures that we used, some of the equipment in the offshore area. our coast guard buoy tenders were designed to be oil skimmer's as well, and so what you see there is one of the coast guard buoy tenders with a skimmer off of the port side.

and then the vast number of these skimmers are private sector owned skimmers. a lot of them were converted supply boats. we brought in skimming gear for a vessel of opportunity literally from all over the world. and here's the nearshore operations. and you can see here, these are using the smaller vessels, a lot of the shrimp boats, fishing vessels. these were the vessels that really didn't have the overnight capacity. so they would go out as far as they could go on a day trip, recover as much oil as they could, and then returned to port. and then the basin beach operations. a lot of boom was deployed as protective measures for these marshes. unfortunately, boom is surely not that effective.

for protecting shorelines that way. the boom is the most effective if you can surround the source of the oil. but in this particular case since there was no ship out there, it was just a pipe spewing out from the bottom of the sea, a mile down. it was impossible to boom in at that source. so there's a huge attempt to try to use boom to protect these marshes, but when my time came, the wind moved, it had very mixed success. so we did a lot of fast response. we developed some techniques to get up in the air in the morning, identify where the oil had gotten overnight, and get in there as quickly as possible, with cleanup personnel. that barriers that we put on the beach were there in the event of

a search began, a hurricane. this was during the hurricane season, and that was mostly as beaches were, are ideal recovery area as opposed to the marshes. and there are a lot of barrier beaches, but, of course, we are very concerned when a search came that we would lose them for that purpose. and this is what i'm going to just talk a little bit about the need for finding new technologies. alternative technologies we don't have in our inventory while the oil spill is going on. and i felt this is one piece of our organization might be the most appropriate for me to comment on in this venue. the designation of a spill is a spill of national significance, meant that all of the federal government could come together

under the guidance of the national commander who is really a tremendous support for the on scene contingent. in doing things like this, you see that he had a director of intergovernmental and interagency activities. and in their, there was a interagency solution grew. at this interagency solution group was really instrumental in doing a number of things which are identified on the sly. we had issues with public safety. we had economic impact. we needed to integrate between the federal government and the private sector, namely mostly the oil industry. and one of the things that we're most interested in down on the

ground was getting these new technologies into some sort of a process, using these agencies of the federal government to vet them and then get them down there on the ground. well, this general blog on the end looked like this. -- this yellow block on the end looked like this. this was the interagency alternative technology assessment program, and at the top you see those are the different sources of technology. some from government, some from private sector. really there was great ideas from technologies that could be moved from other areas in industry or in government, and apply to this problem by modification or what have you that were vetted by this, through this program. they were basically sent in to

be evaluated. and depending on what they were going to apply to, whether it was shoreline protection or offshore orwell containment, or what have you, they went to the appropriate federal experts for evaluation. a lot of them unfortunately didn't pan out. that's not been unusual for technologies. and some of them just had too long of a developmental time to be able to be applied. but my final flight here does have -- final slide your does have sort of the dashboard that resulted. this was for the month of came e 4000 different technologies that were proposed, and they applied in a number of different areas as you see. and some involved sensors, well

had come traditional oil spill response areas and then alternatives for beach treatments, marsh treatments, that sort of thing. and 199 of them actually were useful, determined to be useful by this iatap, and they were delivered to the federal on-scene coordinator for use during the actual spill or recovery operations. so with that i would like to pass a mic here too, i think to director david westerholm. and he has the noaa part of this story. thank you very much. [applause]

>> again, my name is david westerholm. i'm the director of response or restoration for noaa. and as they are giving up my presentation on the screen, i would just be a little bit about my office. i've been there as jim points out, going on for years now. at our office is in charge of, we have an emergency response division that supports the coast guard and epa and other responders with scientific support during emergency response. and you'll see how that happened in deepwater horizon. whether natural resource damage assessment division, and under law we are the natural resource trustees for the maritime resources in assessing the damage, collecting the money that damage done to the public, and then putting that money back in to restoration projects. and that is ongoing and will continue. and again you hear about that later. i also have a marine debris

division that looks out the pollution. but had you asked me maybe two years ago whether i would be talking at this conference i would probably say yeah, i would come year but i would be talking to some of the tools we provide to first responders on a daily basis. some of you use cameo and a low halt to up with emergency decisions for evacuations. and those things come out of my office. but little did we think that we would see a well blowout in our country, surrogate and a couple around the world just a few to go in australia. about 40 years ago just off the coast of mexico. but one that would last, you know, going on as jim pointed out, 88 days, going on 180 days of activity of massive cleanup in an oil spill each day. am going to talk a little bit about our role, but then i'm going to focus on what was on the mind of the public because i think there's some parallel between the work that you guys do every day and some other

things that we saw in deepwater horizon, and hopefully i will move through this and allow plenty of time after our panel is finished for the audience to ask me any particular questions. i have hit a little bit on the technologies, there may be some things that people didn't think about that we thought about beforehand but certainly we were faced with deepwater horizon. so there's five main areas that noaa deals with in a spill response in supporting the federal on-scene coordinator. first we provide scientific support. secondly, we worry about seafood. that's along with the fisheries of the state. we protect the wildlife and habitat because i'm major we assess the damage and then we restore the environment. so a little bit about the scientific support. one of the things we did in deepwater horizon you'll see the environment of response management application. that was chosen as a common

operating picture for the deepwater horizon. but we've also stood up in other capacities. most recently coast guard asked us to do it for the ongoing hurricane, if they were going to be spills or problems after it. so we put this, we put this together. it's something that if you need more information, certainly contact me and i can get it to you, but it has no license fee. we provided as part of a service to the emergency response community. the second thing we did daily was sometimes multiple, sometimes daily during the height of the spill was project forecast. where's the oil going? and then noaa is probably most notable for the national weather service national weather service and the weather forecast. other scientific support, and we'll talk about this a little bit, you get from oceanographic data, current, tide, wind. we get from our satellites and

also from aircraft, and in this case we used gliders to go and try to determine the circulation pattern under what was happening under the water because obviously the oil was rising from a mile deep. with respect -- there we go. with respect to seafood safety, this was the first time that we've ever closed a federal fishery due to an oil spill. we close -- states have closed state fisheries before but it really now hearkens to, you know, a precedent that we have to think about in the future. at what level do we close the fishery, and we do this full scale monitoring -- >> we are leaving this emergency preparedness conference for a moment for what is expected to be a brief pro forma session of the u.s. senate. no legislative business is scheduled and we will return to this conference after the senate

gavels out. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: to the senate, under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3 of the standing rules of the senate i hereby ai point the honorable richard j. durbin, a senator from the state of illinois to fulfill the duties. career. the presiding officer: under the previous order the senate stands previous order the senate stands >> and the senate holds these brief pro forma sessions to prevent the president from making recess appointments. when senators return on tuesday, september 6 they will take up consideration of the nomination of a judge of the u.s. court of

appeals. following a vote on her confirmation the senate will begin work on a house passed bill that overhauled the system. you can watch live gavel to gavel coverage of the u.s. and as always right here on c-span2. now we'll go back life to the emergency preparedness conference as they continue discussing lessons learned from the deepwater horizon oil spill. >> the responsibility for assessing the resource damage comes with the natural resource trustees. those trustees are tribal, states, and then the federal government, the primer to trustees the department of interior and ourselves. and what we look at is compensation for damage to the public. so this is not third party liability. so if you were a fisherman that lost revenue because you couldn't go out fishing, or that the oil spill impacted your boat, you can receive direct payment from the responsible party. if it didn't work you could go

to the national pollution fun center and seek payment from them as part of a claim. but the public, the damage to the resource itself, whether the ecosystem or a particular species, lost opportunity, for example, recreational fishing, or any other impact that is something that we look out, we assess the damage. usually that process can take anywhere from two to 10 years. we've got a tremendous number of people working on it now. and trying to do that, i want as quickly as possible, but put as many resources we can to assess the damage, come to agreement with bp on the claim, collect that money and then turned that in the restoration, which you'll see on the next page, which could be restore and a habitat for particular species. it could be even doing something that would enhance public access

to the waterway. so allah of that, a lot of that is going on now. if people lose sight over that, we just had a major claim for a spill not too far from here in the delaware bay, the largest clinic is national pollution fun center. and its 24 million. we're putting that towards that. just to give it a scale, however, bp has already paid $1 billion up front for early restoration, and that's being used by those resource agencies to put together some of these projects. now, what were some of the public concerns during the event. and i'll be there to brief on this. but i'm divided into what was happening under the water, what was happening on top of the water and what was happening on the shoreline. and really under the water, we

touch on this a little bit already come is the flow rate, how much was coming out, where is it going, how did it change. there was a pipe that came off. how did activities, the response itself and in some cases what did it matter. you know, you are attacking go at the surface, whatever came up, but what role did that play? it certainly made national and local news. there was a lot of concern that we could not get down and get an exact measurement of how much was coming out. technologically that would be very challenging but it's a mixture of oil and gas. there's no flow meter that goes down on it. so these approximations varied a lot of time within the scientific community. and, therefore, caused some public concern. the use of some subsurface dispersant. most of the plaintiff ever been done with the application dispersants on the surface. not that they wouldn't work

underwater but no one had really thought about this. there were a couple of papers written in one test case many years earlier, but it was something that federal on-scene coordinator had to wrestle with and say okay, if i'm going to inject dispersants into the well head, how much, what is the impact, where's the oil going to go, at what levels does it disperse? just to give you some scale, we were looking at, from the release of oil at the wellhead site for the, i'll call it the average particle size, about three hours to the surface. that when you were using dispersants and dispersants is smaller particles, you can actually looking at a dispersant that would take weeks, months or maybe years to rise to the server because it was so small. it became almost neutrally buoyant. so these were concerned. what impact would these dispersants have on deep-sea marine life, the deep-sea corals and other things that were in the area? all great questions.

we had to make a decision without all the answers. so in many cases you were waiting an estimated impact of allowing that are to come to serve a reaching shoreline, versus the dispersant in the water column and eventually the biodegradation, some of it in evaporation and some of it biodegradation into the ocean. which gets sort of the next point which is what actually has happened to it. you probably read wild reports of huge black pools of oil just roam the bottom of the seat waiting to come up and attack the beaches of florida. there were, there was a large volume of oil that was dispersed, but if you were to look at, i'm going to borrow -- if you're going to look at the water in there, you would look at it and it was look as clear as a trip to dispersant.

you wouldn't see the oil droplets. that doesn't mean they were not to pick an attorney doesn't mean they don't have impact on some species. but from a visual point of view it was not the same vision as the oil coming out from the wellhead. and that is, that is something that has been some studies, but certainly it was a gap in our knowledge as to what impact in faith will all this wellhead release like this have on the short term, and then the long-term ecological communities. on the surface, people were worried about whether oil was coming ashore, when it was coming ashore. everyone had, whether was going to impact their vacation. i will tell you the calls we're getting from the governor of florida were very different from the governor of louisiana.

one was concerned about protecting their marshland ecosystems and fisheries. the other was talking primarily tourism. from the area from pensacola to panama beach, they're coming in, you know, the late spring but then fall tourist season, and people were canceling their vacations. so this was a huge, huge issue in the news and also within the local community. the other thing we were concerned about the loop current. if you look in that kind of upper right hand picture, we were fortunate. on any given year is a current that comes up from mexico, the yucatán peninsula that kind of rounds up to the gulf of mexico, loops up close to louisiana and then comes back out through the florida strait between cuba and florida, and then key west. and depending on how high that loop current goes, we know on

some given years it would actually reach up to where that wellhead would be. and the current isn't stratified, if you will necessary top to bottom this would really have to worry about was their underwater part of the loop current that was closer to the wellhead. but if it ever came into that wellhead aerie and picked up the oil then that oil would be transported what would the end result be? i think our best guess would be an increased number of tarballs on the islands, you know, on the eastern side of florida. it actually would miss the west coast of florida can be transported and going east coast of florida. at the news was again capturing that as if they would be huge pools of black oil that were going to come down and impact obligations short of the united states, from new jersey to one report out of going to scotland. i think that these, you know, it was hard to address the unknown

and rationalize it when we are getting bombarded with all these questions at the same time. so you can see there was a lot of interest, but we really didn't know. we knew on day one that the loop current wasn't near the wellhead site. it did approach that and got within about 10 miles of it. and then backed off to about 40 miles. but throughout the evolution we were not sure what would happen. so we did the best we could by dropping sonar buoys and other things to measure it and keep track of it over that period of time. hurricane was an issue. in fact, it actually impacted this spill in a different way. it didn't come through and disrupt the surface oil as much as it had to stop operations because you need so much lead time. windows operations stop, the oil didn't stop. and when operations were able to resume there was more oil on the surface because they hadn't been able to disperse it or burn it

because of the weather conditions nor use mechanical cleanup. then decision about response methods. you know, in one way, you know, from sitting on -- you know, a spill like this is an opportunistic event, it certainly is catastrophic and detrimental to the region. but it did give us a chance to actually use some technology that had really only been tested or used occasionally in the united states. up until this time, you know, most of the burns were probably could count on one hand the number of actual in situ to burn. and none offshore most of those were in short. except for some test burns. he we had hundreds that i think is close to 400, maybe more, in situ burn's. for this oil. likewise, the application dispersants while they have been

done never understood a are on the magnitude. so it posed us with some problems but also show that some of the technology we had in our arsenal would be able to be used in an event like this. and then lastly the mechanical equipment. much of the mechanical equipment, everything that we had in the gulf of mexico, everything that could be brought in from parts of the world, from the east coast to the west coast was brought to bear on this spill. and it's a challenge when the oil spread this far and fast as it does, even the best mechanical equipment can only pick up a fraction of that oil. so that's a concern. i will mention one other thing as we do here. in addition to alternative technologies that jim pointed out, there's a couple other efforts along some of the manufacturers. there's a $1.4 million rise for a breakthrough technology that's

being tested up in the facility in new jersey the twin 10 finalist companies. so we are hoping that the future that this event brings into the future, some of the technology that we need to combat spells. on the surface, i mean on the shoreline, excuse me. it boiled down to and i won't repeat what jim said, what strategy do you use? you have booming, different types of shoreline, marsh, sand. how do you clean it up? what methods do you use? so that kind of brings us to the conference, all right, we have some lessons learned. what are the future risks? this is the best i can describe it. you've got big question. we don't know what the future risks are. we thought we had a pretty good plan in place. and, in fact, one would argue that the ability to mobilize 40,000 people every day into a

spill would probably argue that you did have a pretty good plan in place. but many of our scenarios didn't cover a huge well blowout like this. and you know i will focus on two of the pictures in this one. the ones directly below the question mark actually was some oil tanks that collapsed during the hurricane, katrina, in new orleans. something that we are worried about, the storm force of this hurricane edges came up the east coast didn't do that but there's a lot of oil tanks, as most of you know in your communities, big production facility in the delaware bay, philadelphia, new jersey area, that could have caused massive problems had we gotten the types of wind or storm surge that might have been able to impact the tanks. and the other one, i don't know, in the right hand corner action how many know what the largest bill of the world has ever been.

and if you do, you can raise your hand. but i will answer the question. that action is a terrorist event that was during the kuwaiti oilfield fires during the war. and it dwarfs even what we saw in deepwater horizon. and so when you think about that man-made destruction, there's been times that that happens, we could be looking, you could be looking at an event like that. so as we look ahead at some of the issues i think i've spoken up about seafood safety and fisheries, i'll say one quick word, we need to develop even better and more partnerships with the academic community, with the local, with the state. it's going to be critical as we move forward to study the problem. some of the issues and gaps that we found in this one certainly

pointed that out. the third issue is preserving and managing data. it is even beat on what i could have imagined we have to deal with. in terms of we're living in a technological society. we are just massive amounts of information, and in a case like this which is also both been looked at as potentially criminal and/or civil cases, everyone had to do litigation hold on everything that they collected. every e-mail, every piece of information, every bit of paper. and it has been a tremendous administrative burden as well as an extraordinary expense that was unanticipated at the time. i spoke a little bit about the need for some future research.

certainly one of the problems in the oil spill research has been after a big event you get a little influx of research and development money, but that fades over time. and keeping that up is no different than most of the emergency management community faces every day. getting the influx of money into what's going to help us in the future is critical, but challenging. in a budget situation that our government is going through, both state and federal, that's an even greater challenge but i think it's a priority as citizens we are going to have to push it because i think it gets us to where we need to be to be able to address the problems of the future. and then lastly i want to say a word about the communications. i think, well, that -- the environmental response, but i'm looking for a bigger screen picture. gary davis. one we are working on for the

arctic. but i think that with rapidly developing technology, being able to transport this, which we were able to do to the public, but not right in the beginning of this spill is something that we have to think about in the future. being able to show that picture, allowing them to sort of manipulate and see where the ships were, see with a booming was, see what was happening was, i will call it a nice. it wasn't huge. it was midway through this spill. we could have, it would have been difficult because of funding to do it sooner than that, but it's absolutely essential that we get that information out, which brings me to sort out my last point, which is social media. there was an unending desire for

immediate information, and it's not limited to this event. we saw it in the fukushima event, with the tsunami. we saw with the earthquakes. we saw it with the hurricane. that ability to get it out and get it out quickly if something that we can't get away from. on the other hand, i will tell you that the staff that it took my office to stand up just the piece of information, this common operating picture to the public was as large as it is for the decision-makers. so under regulation and law, and it's very clear that we have an obligation to get to develop and give this information to the decision-makers, but the real challenge is, you know, as part of the emergency management community, as part of this and taxpayers, at what point do we say yes, sir, no to pushing all

the information out to the public? not that we're not trying to be transparent, but just looking at the ramp up and cost and ability to do it, you are developing almost a parallel system. and we really didn't capture in our plan. so i don't have an answer. i posed that question to this audience to think about as we go forward, in a world of twitter and flickr and every other social media peace, if you don't put it out there, it will be put out there for you. but in order to do it, it's a huge move forward in infrastructure and data and i.t. personnel. and that's something that i think that probably bears some discussion in the questions and answers. so i will leave you with that. i thank you very much. and who's next? pat. pat is next. thank you.

[applause] >> greetings. boy, a lot of people making it to the exit when they see me a beer. i'm going to talk for about 10 minutes about the u.s. navy supply, response to the oil spill resulted from the five and subsequent seeking a mobile offshore drilling unit deepwater horizon. i will start by giving a brief timeline, and then i will explain why the navy was involved and then i'll get into the actual operations, and maybe a little more detail about some of this technology you have heard about so far in earlier to briefs. that's a long brief. that's not the right reef, so -- this is a different breed, so i will just have to go without -- you can take that off. i mean, i put the right one in

that bag but i can probably talk through this. so, the timeline was, you know, the fire and explosion on the 20th of april, and the 22nd the rig sank. on the 23rd it was federalize federalized, to start this national incident command center that the admiral spoke about. and on the 27th, the supervisor of salvage and diving, my office received a request to send our pollution control personnel and equipment to the gulf of mexico. on the 30th we got our first year on the water. our maximum deployment was july. we had over 12 miles of them in the water. we were operating 23 skimming systems both offshore and in short, and i will describe the difference between the two. and we had about 150 people working, mostly offshore. the reason that the navy is

involved in pollution abatement is that we operate a fleet, ever decreasing fleet down to 289 ships right now. so we are our own oil spill response organization. we need to clean up after our own mess if we make one. but that mess is relatively small with respect to what is operated and the private sector. we don't refine oil. we don't transport oil by pipeline. our largest tanker will take about 238,000 barrels of oil. so we are sized. we are warehoused. we traynor to clean up our worst-case scenario. so, even though we had the majority of our dear deploy during the deepwater horizon response, that 12 miles of boom and 23 skimmers represented

about 3% of what was out in the gulf of mexico cleaning up oil. most of it was private sector equipment. the slide you don't see is a picture of the public telling us we have to do this. we are not looking to grow our mission. the code of federal regulations has salvage facilities act written into a subsequent to pearl harbor and it basically states that my office is responsible for conducting salvage a public and private sector. incident to salvage from often you have pollution even if it is not a tanker. ship has its own bunkers. it runs aground, to conclusion, the same organization that conducting the south which to also try and pick up that oil. our gear came from three different locations. one on the west coast, one on the east coast and one in alaska. the equivalent with was both skimming and booming, and we

have worldwide storage of equipment, but we did not bring our equipment from bahrain, the middle east, or hawaii, or singapore. a couple of reasons. one, as i said we were about 3% of tier that was not on site. flying these equipment is very expensive. even the stuff that came from alaska was dropped. and also there are some local agreements in, say, 54 in a way that would preclude us from moving back year. if it had been necessary, if there's a cost-benefit analysis we could have, we can move the equipment and develop the higher risk posture in those areas, but since we were as i said a small portion of what was out there, the decision was made mullahs are -- for us to move our continental, alaska equipment to

site. the apple is correct, booming is not effective in the long term. we have some of our boom out in the water for four months. boom issues normally to put around a tanker, ship to ship field transfer operation or to clean up after a tankers hold warships collide. this 42-inch open ocean boom is big equipment. the anchor chain on the other side is -- that's 4500 pounds per shot. so if you have somebody in your organization that can throw that on their own, let me know. i have a job for them. this is mostly done with doctors and ship winches. big equipment of the anchors are 1000 pounds on either side. and if you operate in the gulf of mexico you know that body of water is crisscrossed by multiple pipeline. so every anchor have to survey and. every thousand that section of

them you have to do a test on. you have to survey the data first, you have to make sure that the small section of boom that you employ initially doesn't move. the anchors don't drag over some pipeline and then you can install full section. so start putting them in the water ends up being a process that takes a sniff good amount of time. it's done using offshore supply vessels, trains and tigers on them come and just so you have some idea, those cost $9,200,000 a day. -- those cost 90, $2,100,000 a day. we also do some of the structures in the gulf of mexico to place our boom. has anybody been in the day? to come out and taken the left and go north and you see every thousand feet is a structure. that was the rule back in the '80s. that's how often you can, every

1000 feet. there was no directional drilling back in the '70s and '80s. so in order to bring those hydrocarbons to market these countries would puncture the formation on the grid. so we used those very well spaced structures to tie the boom to the structure in order to flex oil so it didn't get up and did some louisiana marshes. that was somewhat effective, but again lead the boom out there for months, have a couple of tropical storms and hurricane cancer and it will be less effective. our gear was deployed from whiskey island in aptly named whiskey island -- [inaudible] i didn't see any out there, boss. but that's about as far west as we got, and then all the way to panama city florida.

we had 150 people offshore. we did have people living on this boat or months at a time. and my boss came down searle times to see the operations. and we tried to do as much as we could hiring local personnel. personnel. soviet displaced people in this area. they are not working. we have our experts, but we don't keep on staff enough people to man this type of operation for months at a time. so my boss is very personable. he wanted to come out to see this operation, and he was talking to some of the folks on our lift the boat. ..

and fortunately, admiral, i'm showing you some pictures that were in my brief so i don't have to show you them again, we operated in shore and offshore skimming systems. the offshore the admiral showed you that was being towed by at buoy tender. this is the way to get oil off the surface to be as close as possible. the oil has not dissipated

yet. it is thicker on the surface and our onboarding rate was about 85%. we would pick up a volume of oil in this skimming system which you saw, basically bladders that are towed port and starboard in the ship. the oil is collected into a center pocket. you put a pump suction in that pocket and pump into tanks on the ship. so 85% of what we were recovering offshore, close to the site was oil onshore where they see you skimming and you have a direct visual impact that you're doing something for the community. our efficiency is less because the oil has a chance to spread out but we are able to target certain locations. don't let the oil get into

lake pontchartrain. we can put skimmers in place and do boom reflection to try to prohibit the oil from getting in these areas. this type of operation we use local people a lot. so we have one of our skimmers, the technology has not changed a lot since i operated one of these in prince william sound after exxon valdez ran aground. the only major difference is now that we have modular skimmers we can put on a truck and not need a wide load permit which is big deal if you're coming from alaska through 20 states. basically we tow that boat or skimmer through two legs of boom that are 300 feet long each. what we use to tow, normally local fishermen. why? they don't need a chart. they know where the oil is and they know how to navigate. also now they're employed. they weren't employed before because they couldn't fish. so we get two shrimp boats.

put them on each leg of boom and we'll toe our skimmer through the oil. the skimmer has induction pumpp that pumps five to ten gallons. sticks to the belt. there is chemical term but that's what happens. sticks to the belt. the oil squeezes into the 40 barrel sump the water is overboarded and bring the oil to a storage facility. the total amount of oil that we collected, and i have nice chart that you can't see here, was about a million gallons. that is a very small amount compared to the what was actually coming into the ocean. but again, we're not sized, that is what the navy collected. that is after decanting. so that's actual oil. that's not volume. that's not volume of fluid. again we're a small piece of a very large operation. we're glad that we had a chance to help and i'll stand by for any questions

afterwards. thanks. [applause] >> i like your presentation, working for you, good job of recovering there. i didn't bring any dispersant with me. i brought some toys on account i believe we retain more than what we hear about what we see than what we hear, do you agree with that? most of you? you've been sitting here about 2 1/2 hours. here's a little exercise for you. i'm going to show you, i got a lot of pictures in my presentation by the way. i'm going to show why i believe that we will remember more by what with see than by what we hear. if you would indulge me for a second and put your hand over your head in the shape of an okay sign. all of you. there you go. around like this.

air stirring up, get your blood goings. put up against your chin. your chin is down here. boy, i tell you what, admiral see the deal down here. earlier the police chief mentioned the fact that a little bit of humor, relationships go a long way. i believe in disaster management which is my cup of tea, my specialty, the thing that i'm passionate about. that relationships are the number one thing. so, if we, if we could, bring, there we go. i'm actually, i'm the emergency manager and homeland sector for the parishes in northwest louisiana. my family came to louisiana by covered wag goon -- wagon. if you saw rest of my family you know why they covered that wagon. i live in keithville, louisiana. our heaviest industry is a 400-pound avon woman.

you probably never heard of keithville, louisiana. i want to talk about the deepwater horizon event. cannon 252. called by many names in the state of louisiana. in the state of louisiana called by a lot of different names. the admiral mentioned a while ago about the shrimp and the crab and the crawfish. i just got to clear up, shrimp and crab are seafood that come out of saltwater. crawfish are freshwater. i know about crawfish. most folks think this is belt. this is leather fence around a crawfish graveyard i'm hear to tell you. so i know about them crawfish. all right, the green one moves us forward? is that the technology we're using today? there are 64 parishes in the state of louisiana. we have parishes rather than counties because of our heavy french influence back when we were founded years and years ago when they were still fighting for all the territories around the nation. 63 office of emergency management. i have distinct opportunity to represent two of those parishes. i answer to six elected

officials. two mayors, two sheriffs and two parish presidents. if you don't think that is delicate juggling act on any given day just get all the ekbos in one room. there is not any headroom in there. there is plenty of leg room but not much headroom. why would the state of louisiana tap into a local emergency manager versus a state employee or somebody that works for the governor's office in homeland security? i believe that is because over the years i developed relationships. i have delivered the goods when it came to the bad day, katrina, rita, gustav, ike. bp oil spill. mississippi river flooding earlier this spring and many local disasters that affected our state and regional disasters that affect the louisiana, texas and arkansas. i believe what i want to talk to you about briefly this morning, i will try to wrap this up in 15 minutes. i'm a baptist. old baptist preacher taught me one time instead of looking at watch when

presenting you put a mint in your mouth. this is my ten minute mint. i put that in my mouth and when the mint is gone i know it is time to wrap up. i was in st. louis, missouri six months ago. i put my 30 minute mint i gave the my presentation. i got to my last slide i mint was still whole. i talked faster. people started to getting antsy. i discretely turn and around at spit the mint out. it was button off my sports coat. i made a bad mistake. as i mentioned command in robert, louisiana. eventually moved to knew or liens. houston was source control. biloxi, mobile and miami were also former operations. under our scope of authority within unified command at homa. grand isle, lafite and ven is in. you notice the grand isle and lafite were both in the same parish, jefferson

parish. it is across the 40 miles from the bay to one location to the other. rather than have a forward command 40 piles away from the action was the we chose to put two forward commands within the parish. beside that parish president was a little more vocal than some so. the oil pollution act has been mentioned. we had a conference call a week ago to coordinate this. some of my slides will be redundant that my other presenters have put forward. oil pollution act of 1990 you may result is the direct result of exxon valdez. navigable waters ways are coast guard is the authority. also responsible party in the state. kind of upside down what we typically have under disaster management. typically the locals, then region, then your state and then your federal partners. this is what it looked like at houma at the unified command. governor's office called me. i was on vacation with friends of mine from saskatchewan.

there is really a place in canada. i was at eau gallie plantation. can you, be brief. need you to help run the operation be the deputy state director and coordinator with the bp oil spill. so he sent me down to houma to the command post. how many are you there working a command post? okay. how many people is in your command post typically? 5, 10, 15, 20, 100? this is what it looked like in houma on the first day. i was the one in the middle. i was the fox with all the hounds. the hounds had been down there for about a week and a half before i got there. now what my job was to get all the hound and the fox nose pointed in the same direction. that is pretty much what you as a in emergency response, emergency management, if you are a vendor delivering products and technology for that end user your job is to get everybody's nose pointed in the same direction. you had to be a change agent. i believe that's one reason

they asked me to come down i'm some what of a change agent. i believe in being visionary and how to best manage those emergencies. all these photographs, i need to do a little, one of those little legal blushes like they do on all the commercials. all the photographs that you will see in my presentation i personally took and all the opinions expressed in my presentation are mine and nobody else's. so anything that i say can and will be held against me i'm sure. a surface operation we actually had no control over in houma. that was the area command's responsibility. however, we did have to have daily updates and what was going on out there so we would know how it would impact the state of louisiana. there were air operations as well. some of the air operations we had control over when we were sending out our rapid assessment teams and those scat teams, the shore cleanup assessment teams. now can you tell me, this

was taken from a helicopter off one of the barrier islands there in louisiana. can you tell me what the dark spot in the water is, anybody? we were getting calls from commercial airline pilots coming out of houston flying to orlando, there is huge amounts of oil in the gulf of mexico. so we had to try to educate folks. we had to be change agents. we had to think about outside the box. not only people would typically have responsible over but the comercial airline pilots as well. we had to bring them in communications what was oil and what was cloud cover. that was cloud cover. there were near-shore operations. this is grand isle, louisiana. i think there is a laser pointer on here. if you, you can see back in the bay, in the center part of the picture there are a couple of boats there. those are the vessels of opportunity. they have already been mentioned by the other folks up here presenting. the official name for them were vessels of opportunity. we called them the cajun

navy. they were quite creative. onshore operations when the oil came onshore as mentioned earlier the best way to recover, the best way to prevent future damage from that oil was if it came onto a sandy beach. we don't have very many sandy beaches in the state of louisiana. most of our shoreline is marshland. we lost our barrier island. what are the regulations we fall under even though we are under emergency operations we still have to adhere to those ocean regulations -- osha regulations. shade every 100 yards. had to have rest rooms every 100 yards along the shoreline. of course we used multiple atvs for transporting those personnel. what is the number one issue in every disaster response? i bet you can tell me. during the after-action report what does everybody always say? communications, communications communications. now communications for me sometimes are difficult.

you may have noticed i have a little bit of an accent. i may talk different but i think just like you do. i believe that we have to communicate clearly before we can be effective in emergency response disaster and recovery. there were 11 state agencies that were in that command post in houma. there were 1200 people roughly, 800 on day shift and 400 on the night shift in the command post there at houma. of those, there were 11 state agencies. remember the picture of the hound and the fox? those 11 state agencies all had their noses pointed in a different direction. they had been down there for nine or ten days. most of them didn't even know the other agency existed within that command post. i'm talking about louisiana agencies here. these are not federal or private agencies. these are louisiana agencies. include our state police. department of environmental quality, department of health and hospitals. what do the health and hospitals have to do with an oil spill? in the state of louisiana they regulate oysters. the department of ag regulates fishing, wildlife.

regulates fish and other shellfish but the department of health and hospitals regulates oysters. at some point in time there must have been some money tied in that the reason that takes place. it takes a lot of money to keep corrupt politicians corrupt, by the way. the, so what i had to do, i had to go on the first day, knock on every door in that command post and say who are you and what is your role and responsibility in this spill? what i found out who they were then i had to say who within this room is in charge of your agency? be in this room at 1500 hours every day, starting today. drop everything you're doing. if you're in charge of your agency you be here, okay? we did that. we sat down and we determined on a very first day there were three different state agencies that were trying to get aerial support for boom strategies. we were misusing the resources that we had. we had limited aerial support. we had limited boom and we had too many agencies that

were trying to use that same resource. we had to sit down across the table look each other in the eye and determine whose priority was who and perhaps hand off some of those responsibilities from one age to the other to become efficient. we started having daily parish conference calls. guess who we needed to be listening to? there is old cherokee indian proverb if you listen to the whispers you don't have to hear the screams. that is the case in emergency management and disaster response. we had to listen to what the parish concern was. of course they were concerned about oil coming onshore but they were also worried about the economy of their pair remember. they were worried about their people going back to work. they would worried how they would survive next season. 30% of the seafood in this nation comes through the gulf of mexico. 80% of our nondomestic oil comes in through a pipeline south of the state of louisiana, about 80 miles out in the gulf. managed by walking around. my cohorts here had

mentioned already in the fact that their supervisors came out in the field to see what was going on. i call this picture the weight of the world on his shoulders. mike was the incident commander for the state of louisiana. during recovery process he was and i think still is assigned to the state of louisiana. he works for bp. he worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week. i don't know how in the world he ever managed to survive. this is on father's day in 2010. he and five other gentleman got on citation jet the we lowest houma, louisiana, flew down to the gulf, orange, texas, all over entire louisiana coast. out to the source, did a couple circles around the source. refueled in biloxi and went to apalachicola and back. why did we do that? we had to see what was going on. we were getting situation reports. we saw the same oily pelican on news every day you did. the same old bird they showed every day. we had to get out and manage

by walking around. this guy had tremendous decisions to make. who within your agency has the ability to, not the responsibility, there is difference and responsibility and ability. the ability to handle that kind of pressure? you have to know that ahead of time. situational awareness, reports were coming in, everybody has got a cell phony more. i mentioned already the airline pilots. all of our vessels of opportunity were reporting oil and of course everybody, all the 14 coastal parishes in the state of louisiana thought they should have priority when it came to situational awareness. come into the sit room. it would be handed off. it would be researched. handed off to operations and hopefully a move of some kind made either identifying the truly was oil or whether it was some other item. we had red algae blooms quite often that were often times thought to be oil. and those kind of things. this was a coast guard command. as you can see, it was set up with lapp to, cell phones. sometimes in a disaster situation as the chief mentioned in his opening

statements you lose all that technology. you have to go back to old school. sometimes pencil, pens and paper to keep documentation on important items. as was mentioned by our partner here with noaa there were weather and spill trajectories. current. ocean, wind currents. humidity, everything has an impact where that spill is going to go. every day it was different. guess what, plaquemines parish think he is we're closest to the spill, st. bernard's parish things their closest to the spill and jefferson parishtics thinks they have biggest economic impact. instant action plan, in our decision making we had to include and incorporate those things. so severe weather strategy. we talk about what happens to the oil but what happens to the responders? what happens to those 40,000 people you have working out in the field when a hurricane decide to come into the gulf of mexico? we had to be ready to move

not only those 1200 workers that were in our command post but those other 10,000 or so workers that were assigned to the offshore operations near shore operations and onshore operations. where do we move those additional folks? we already have million three people in coastal parishes of louisiana. you've been katrina with us. gustav and ike with us. most of your states hosted our residents. we already had those folks. what would we do with the additional 40,000 not typically down there? those were decisions that had to be made. radio communications. responsibility of the coast guard. we soon realized that, our state, federal and local partners include responders couldn't communicate with each other by radio. louisiana invested millions and millions and millions of dollars since katrina that gives us inneroperability with every state emergency response system in the state of louisiana can talk with other emergency response agencies. we stood that system up. we could talk by portable

radio, handheld radio from brownsvillle, texases to miami, florida. they tapped into the lwin system. that money came into the play not only for the state of louisiana but for the entire gulf coast region on when we stood up for this event. command posted a administration, security was important. there were some folks mad at bp. and command post we were in, guess what they had on very font front building a huge green and yellow of bp how the in the middle of swamps in louis. there are folks down there, you probably seen old troy and his gang on swamp people, there are folks like that live there that were angry. we had to be sure we secured the command post. i want you to think not only what we did for this event but what would you do in the event you had a large-scale disaster where you had to worry about security of the command post. we use ad scanning civil. people scan in the mornings. they scanned out when they left building. they scanned when they ate lunch.

scannedded when they went to the restroom, got laundry done anything else. we know at any time where the folks were. you're made up of mind, body and spirit. everybody has to take care of those three things in order to stay healthy. we recognized that within the come pond post. massage, that sound. you had to make appointment for massage. i had was down there for four months. every time i went there would be beautiful young lady giving massages. i set an appointment. by the time i got there would be some guy bigger than me and burly doing massages. i never debt gid me one. dining room, this facility was set up 50 to 80 people would be training in this facility every day. 50 to 80 people in this facility every day. how many did i tell you we had in there? 1200. so what do you think happened to the dishwasher and the ovens and stoves and the sewer system that went into a, for lack of a better word, a cesspool? oxdation, pond whatever the fancy word in the country.

in we call it a cesspool. it was overwhelmed. after 20 days we decided best way to handle that is paper goods. guess what happened about three days later when we transferred to paper goods? we had such a huge trash problem. there was not a trash collector in the area that could handle that for us. so we went back and tried to resolve some of those issues. laundry, office supplies, shipping. in order to keep your people on the point and in order to keep your people in the hunt, in order to keep your people, mind, body and spirit in the fight, you got to take care of all their needs. we set up laundry services. we set up office supplies. shipping had to be done any kind of communications that you need to do back with your families was available in that command post. moved in portable office space. you see these tanks on the bottom are actually sewer. we collect those in port-a-potty. honey pot guys come by and take that out. we take the employee parking lot, bp bought additional properties next door to them under u.s. highway 90. and, they had a shuttle

service out to the parking lot. everybody's brother had a command post. you got to coordinate that under the administration your command post to be sure there is good information going in, good information going out. this happened to be the governor's office command post here. public information. we haven't talked about much about public information. our friends from noaa talked about that briefly. public information more mornly public information. i only not had opportunity to work in command at houma but had the opportunity to visit the bp command post in grand isle, louisiana. public opinion. everybody down there thought that bp belonged in the toilet. i think that if there, and this, this is again is sandy davis's opinion. this is the not opinion of any other panel members here or my office or anybody that answer to. bp did a poor job of public relations. they did a poor job of getting the factual information out to, they

controlled too much of that information because they were worried there would be litigation later. i believe we share factual information in a timely fashion important to the good of the citizens and important to the good of the operation it is a win-win for everybody. i understand there's some information that has to be held close to the cuff but i believe when you got thousands of people that are of this opinion you will never be able to correct that. impact on the community real quick. recreational fishing everybody in louisiana loves to fish. at one point the governor wanted recreational fishing opened back up to catch and release. the secretary of agriculture explained to him in no uncertain terms, governor, i do not support recreational fishing for catch and release. well secretary barr, why do you not support catch and release? he said, governor, in case you never noticed louisiana is a catch and eat state, not a catch and release state. we went in and we leased out

restaurants at these forward command posts so those individuals who, you hear so much about the economy being impacted. it was impacted but we tried our best to use local resources any time we could. we hired out actually, what would have been in slow season for these individuals and basically paid their bills. forward staging, this was at coventry. vessel of opportunities, this is a local shrimp boat that has contaminated boom on it they were bringing back in. other vessels of opportunity, you see the large vessel in the back with the yellow boom. that is a shrimping rig that was set up with boom. these are, near-shore skimmers that were mentioned earlier. jack-up barges. we had in the marshland, you think that is firm ground but it's not. it is basically a really mushy, soft, you can't walk on it without damaging it. so rather than these boats and ships having to go into port, be reloaded and go back out, we employed jack

up barges. these barges have legs up to 150 feet tall. they're typically used in the industry, oil and gas drilling industry offshore. you set those platforms up and use them as a place to resource your vessel of opportunity. large staging barges in the deeper water where we didn't have the ability to put those jack up barges. they have restroom facilities. they did deed feeding on there they had air-conditioned office space as well. diversion boom. we already talked about boom so i won't belabor that. in some places where we couldn't boom across open channel because commerce had to continue to go through we put diversion boom. we diverted that boil into catch pool and vacuum trucks onshore vacuum it up. boom is terrible strategy for this type of oil spill. you can see here that the tide came in. we actually had a slight storm surge from tropical storm. came in over washed the boom and actually got oil in the marsh. now, here again, this is not official word.

the way that they got rid of that oil in that marsh right there, was with a 15 cent pack of matches. you go out and you light the marsh, you let it burn. the oil had not gotten into the root system and about two weeks, that marsh greened back up so wasn't nearly environmental impact that perhaps could have been. here again, boom, the reason i did this, i mentioned earlier that oily pelican i say that facetiously. when i left down there four months into the event there were less than 1,000 bird had been killed, counted had been killed by impact. you probably thought millions and millions of birds had been killed. awful lot of people, 40 some thousand people put their heart and soul in this response to keep that from happening. this was called pelican island. i think every parish in louisiana has a pelican island. there is politics. political boom, we put miles, not feet, not yards, miles and miles and miles of boom out for political reasons. if i had that all to do over

again that is probably one thing i would have to to stand my ground firmest on we wouldn't do political boom. we got point laughing putting one of murals on back of 18-wheeler showed guys unloadedding boom. they have realistic-looking things they cover your vehicle with. wherever the governor was going tomorrow we was going to move that 40 foot trailer with the picture guy moving that boom on there. i mean, it was something. so, political boom. you got to be aware of snake oil salesmen. i believe you called it innovative technology or some fancy word. i call it snake oil. because i can. this is grand isle, sand wash operation. these snake oil salesmen come in, you didn't sell this to us, none of you vendors sold this snake oil to us, did you? they set up, idea scoop up of sand off grand isle, one of the only habitable islands in louisiana, we scoop it up. we put it into this hopper. would shake all the plastic

all that out of it and drop over into this blue thing that haddage at the same time tore in it and wash it with warm soapy water. there wasn't enough natural gas pressure coming in. so they had to run it off propane, wouldn't get up to 1010 degrees. heck it, was 110 degrees outside. they washed it and come over to the second thing. it would be real nice. it would be pretty. guess what? 15 minutes into the operation this thing assaulted in. they didn't expect that. -- silted in. we dealing with sand. i ain't no genius i had believe there is silt in the sand. would you believe that? it didn't work. here's an example of oily waive. a few of these slides. this was oily wave came ashore that created problems for us. there is guy even the best laid plans requires a plan b. boom was not a good strategy. hesco baskets. oh, yeah, that is the answer. we'll put hesco baskets.

when water comes onshore with a little and we scoop it up in the sand wash machine that snake ol' salesman sold us. hesco baskets are used by military to provide for the if i nation in bases as we fight overseas. they're basically a wire basket. get them anywhere three to seven feet tall. i different lengths. they have a liner in the middle of them. fill them up with sand or gravel or something heavy. when you get through with the operation, take a crane and pick them up, sand stays right there. good idea, right? say it, yeah, good idea. that sounds good. i'm going to write that down. here what hesco baskets look like after a four-foot storm surge. we had a tropical storm come through and wiped out miles and miles and miles of hescco baskets took days and days to set up. sometimes plan. about doesn't work very well either. i'm certainly not making fun of the boom. i'm not making fun of the hesco you have to be continually head ahead of

the curve of disaster management. boom got up in the mashes. now you can't walk in this mash how do you boat in this marsh? you push the oil and push con tam nantsd down to the soil and do more damage had you did let it come to shore and burned it off. stranded boom. see it didn't do any good. miles and miles and miles of it. last thing i want to talk about is recovery. the claims. we had to get started immediately with how we were going to help those folks recover. and, i don't work for bp. i never made a nickel off bp but bp was very mindful of the situation there. they moved as quickly as they could. they actually make payments on claims i believe were not legitimate claims. again that is my personal opinion. they were not legitimate claims because they wanted so badly to be able to cover and take care. i'm going to close real quick with some folks that were down there in my command post. has absolutely nothing to do with bp but i will share with you anyway. disaster management i believe there are some characters that we have that

are trouble to us when it comes to disaster management, whether it be in the our command post, whether be on our staff, whether it be our vendors, whatever might be. the first one, tateter families. you may not have taters in this part of the country you may have potatoes but we got taters and we like gravy on them. tell you that. like crawfish just as much. meet the tater family. this is daddy. richard. he is southern boy. all southern boys got nicknames. my real name ain't sandy. my real name is charlie. when i graduated from high school in 1972 my buddies got draft notices to vietnam and i got invitation to go to work for mary kay cosmetics. so nickname could come in handy. ol' richard like southern boy, like richard milhous nixon his nickname is dick.

he is dictator. he happens to be fireman. he is authoritarian, a ruler tyrant, autocrat, despot, warlord and oppressor. has to have his things his way. never open to new ideas. if things don't go his way he take his ball and go home. you can't be dictator and be effective in disaster management. dictator was at louisiana state fair in shreveport, louisiana. you see them couples, you think my god where did they find each other and they got kids. dictator he got married. he married this woman and her name is hesi she is hesitate tore. she is pretty thing. put her lipstick on for this picture. she is procrastinator. she always gets left behind. life pass her buy. she misses out of greatest joyce this life. because she is hesitate. you see what direction i'm going with these taters?

little agi. she is ag i have i-tater you can't be dick-tater, hezi-tateter or agie-tateter and be effective. always making live difficult for those around here. feed her with golden spoon and still complains about something being wrong. she is agie-tater. she has a brother. i bet you dent know there was this many taters in the world. he is. pec-tater. he is observer, bistander passer-by. never throws down his pom-poms and gets in the game. in order to be effective in disaster management you can't be a spec-tater. i made them in. there they are. they are twins. they the pride of the family. immie-tater is pirate and forge and mimic other people's disaster plans and way they handle? absolutely. you have to tailor them to

yourself. tailor them to specific needs and risk and what you assess the risk to be. never has dream of never has original thought. afraid to try new things. never receptive to change. always plays the same old song on same old fiddle. anybody know the difference between violin and fiddle anybody? violin and fiddle? difference is master's degree in music. [laughter] llimi tater, is a hindrance. never knows his abilities. never reaches full potential. always stuck inside the proverbial box. if you or anyone is a dictater, hezi tater, agie tater. it is income bent to mentor those individuals to change the attitude or eliminate them from the fold because they hold you back from disaster management whether during response or training or preparation or recovery from disasters. you can't be a dictater. can't be agi tater. can't be hezi at the same

timer. or. pmmi tater. i think we'll open up for questions. if anybody has any questions please feel free to give these now. thank you. [applause] >> i hope mike -- mics work here on the table and you have them out there in the aisle. so we really would like to get good idealogue going here. it has been a great panel and i'm looking forward to answering any questions you might have. yes, sir? >> got one question. mr. davis, thanks for keeping us awake. thank you very much for everybody i guess that was involved in mitigating the oil spill because we are able to dive in key west. anyway, sir, after it is all said and done, what was the total cost or approximate cost of that damage or the disaster?

>> that's a great question. it was in the billions of dollars. >> billions. >> yes. i think the important thing was none of it was federal or state taxpayer dollars. it was all bp dollars, and that's thanks to the, to the legislation that we have in this country which basically says spillers pay. one dollar figure that sticks in my mind is i believe bp has set aside on their books some $40 billion as a liability for the ultimate outcome of this spill, which is, not that far out of range when you think about the history of oil spills. usually a much smaller percentage is incurred

during the response than the ultimate liability on the spiller. so i think, for the actual response you're looking at about $5 billion. and it's interesting to compare that number with the total amount of money that the federal government keeps in a contingency fund called the oil spill liability trust funds which comes from a tax on the shipment of barrels of oil in and out of ports in the country. but it tops out at about a billion dollars. so, we were very is very fortunate to have a spiller that had those kind of deep pockets for this spill. we would have had to have some emergency legislation from the u.s. congress had bp not stuck with this and they went way, way beyond their legal limit of

liability as far as the response is concerned. and the way the law's written, that's typically what oil companies do because you're certainly going to not engender the good will of the people in the united states if you stop your response and ultimately, as i mentioned, the dollars for the restoration and the claims and the all of the damages are going to be far more than the response. and, you know, i think each of us mentioned that there were some, i think, really aggressive oil spill response actions going on. this was a 24/7 operation. this was a no-holds-barred, bring in everything from everywhere in the world. so that's why the dollar figures are so large and the

response. >> thank you, sir. >> be sure to understand too what the admiral says. those state, local and federal resources that were allocated were reimbursed by bp. there were no taxpayer dollars. and here again, i don't work for bp. i never drawn a penny from them other than the salary i drew through the state of louisiana during this bp response. but what i would like to also add, admiral, is that this response, when the local tv stations covered when i came home, i told them this. the potential was here. the reality was here. and the reality was here and not here because of those 40,000 people that came out and responded and did their job and because bp was willing to say, hey, if you think that will work, bring it to the fight. so there was an awful lot of effort on the part of not only agencies represented here but those private industry that were actively

engaged and other state, federal and local partners. it was a tremendous, unbelievable effort to keep that impact from being as great as it was. >> yes, sir? >> yes. gary minute nety telecommunications systems out of annapolis. i was curious from communications technology perspective, what the problems, challenges you were faced with open mobile communications? did you use satellite communications for some of the communications as you were further offshore? >> yeah, i'll just talk briefly but i want to open that up to the whole panel. certainly we needed communications offshore. we did use satellite communications. there's, you know, satcom systems on the drilling platforms on the deep ships. for aviation we actually had customs and border protection, p-3s flying

overhead as a means of managing the air traffic over there. they used normal aviation frequencies, aircraft to aircraft. we used high frequent, hf radios for the offshore. we used vhf frequencies for near-shore. we put vhf transponders on those vessels of opportunity so that we could track them electronically. and ultimately our biggest concern, as i mentioned, you know, i was really, had to be focused on the safety issue and we had, at one point i remember the critical number was nine. we had nine near misses with aircraft. mostly in the coastal area. i think sandy mentioned he had a lot of different agencies that were unnecessarily duplicating

effort. that actually caused safety issues. so, we went to the air force. tyndall air force base there has the capacity to set up an emergency air traffic control center that they had used for the haiti earthquake. actually it can manage air traffic anywhere. and they did set up there. and we, we had communications and air traffic management out of tyndall air force base. but the, the need for communications, i think, is still an issue. we may have come a long way with state, county and local radio systems that are greatly improved since 9/11. i think the, the offshore, when you mix navy, coast guard, commercial, aircraft,

and all of those different activities in an area where you can not, you know, put repeater systems on the ground because there is no ground, that's still something that we need to deal with and probably the answer is satellites. any other comments for -- >> yeah, i'll make one quick comment and that's, certainly you talked about the offshore challenges and how we solved those but i will add, at least on the command post, near-shore side, one of the things many people in the room will remember any time we went to a disaster in the past we had to pass radios or beepers or some way to get ahold of them to get their attention to call back. i can't think of anybody who didn't report into the command post-without a cell phone of the so all that information was already taken. it allowed the ability to communicate by way of cell phone and e-mail, in addition to all the communication civil that the bp set up and all the stuff

we did offshore. that is something we've come accustomed to as a country. but in a big disaster like this, allows you quickly by computer to find where people are and get ahold of them no matter where they are and when you're dealing with 1200 people in command post and holding a meeting someone is not right there you can call them and they will come. >> thank you very much. i have to say, really great collaboration amongst all the various agencies. you should really be commended. excellent. >> communication, we still using string and a can. >> i know that [laughter] >> dave newton with aero incorporated. i had a general question. the most important thing about this presentation is what you take away from it and where we move ahead. the theme of this conference is technologies for, you

know, critical incidents. i applaud the efforts of the coast guard and r&d center to try to collate some inno tate of it -- innovative technology or snake oil salesmen equipment that might be available near-term but, you know, there are, at least three departments represented on the dais here. the question for the panel in general is, what, what's the government doing here to collate the needs for the future and roll that into technology development and oversight by different r&d organizations across the board? that under an environment where, i'd say in the dhs perspective we're not investing maybe a million dollars a year in r&d for this particular subject. how do you get critical mass across the board and

identify things that are really the sweet spot and, you know, in the r&d world? we need to take that lead from what the operators and the people on the front line identify as their critical needs. so, where do we go from here? >> a couple things come to mind. first of all there's been several reports, presidential report, there's been a national incident commander report, there's, been an independent report, that coast guard chartered and finally our federal on-scene coordinator report is just about to get published. i think as far as what are the things that bubbled out that we need to focus the country on? i think if you go through those various after action reports per se you will find some of those gaps between where we are coming out of this spill and where we need

to be. i think the next question is, okay, what do you do about it? well there's an inneragency organization that was established back in the open 90 legislation that vets those things and the there are i think quite able to determine the priorities and even where these kind of research and development activities are going to be most successfully accomplished. it is not all going to be accomplished by the coast guard r&d center. this needs to be done by other government r&d centers and a lot of private or academic r&d centers or in some cases partnering with our overseas partners. we've seen a lot of good work done in europe, particularly up in northern europe where they have had some pretty catastrophic oil spills. so the, the issue then comes

down to funding and i will be the first one to admit that, and i think dave mentioned this, that, you know, following that legislation which set the whole system up very effectively, the funding lasted for a couple of years and then, and then that was it. it has been down to a million, maybe even less per year for the last decade or so. so, i think that's where the challenge lies. you know, i think that we probably are boeing to have another oil spill. we only have to look at the history here and see that every ten or 20 years something like this happens. and the next one is problem i -- probably going to be in an area that is even more challenging than this is.

one of the lessons earned here is not unlike the event that caused the modern coast guard to exist which is the titanic hitting the iceberg 100 years ago and that is that often times we get ahead of ourselves in our ability to design things to make our lives better, whether it's a ship to get us across the atlantic ocean in 1912 or a means to be able to extract oil in a mile deepwater and we need to keep up with those contingency plans and those resources and those technologies that go with the what if, and so that's what we're dealing with. when you look out 20 years from now, we may be drilling oil in the arctic. we may be next dreamly

deepwater, to get oil. or we may be using some form of transportation that involves liquified natural gas, to actually reduce our carbon footprint or whatever might be. but, are we going to be prepared for the, the unexpected accident that occurs? and are we going to be thinking about the security needed to prevent a man-made occurrence. i think dave mentioned this wasn't the worst incident that has occurred in the history of the world. that worst incident was due to a terrorist event. so we've got a lot to think about and i'd like to see if any of the other panelists have any comments. >> i don't think this microphone works. anyway, you can probably hear me. did you see the pictures shown by two of the presenters of the orange

bladder being towed by a ship to pick up oil. that is noni current buster. norwegian oil institute. so we are also looking at what the private sector is doing. the government doesn't have, we're fiscal fiscally-constrained, right? yes, we need to do some research and development but there is significantly more money available for research and development in this area for people that might be a responsible party for operating a pipeline or operating a supertanker, equipment we don't operate. so we are also in addition to this research that the admiral talked about, we are continually polling the private sector's capability. we send people to trade shows and we evaluate and we get models of this gear to test and we put that in our inventory. that's on the skimming and booming side. i don't know if you're familiar with the marine well containment corporation.

so subsequent to this oil spill multiple independent and large oil companies have formed a nonprofit organization. they have put a billion dollars into it. and what their goal is to be able to cap a well at 10,000 feet at 60,000 barrels a day. so that equipment has already started to move to a warehouse and they will eventually test that equipment offshore. the problem is standardization. everyone's well isn't the same. everyone's lower marine riser package, bop connection isn't all the same but the goal is to have a piece of equipment deployable relatively quickly and that have been tested so you can get into a containment phase much earlier than was done in this case. and as the admiral stated most of the oil that went into the environment that was recovered was recovered via containment and not by skimming or booming.

>> i want to make one thing clear. i kind of made fun of the snake oil salesmen. in the business i'm in, we couldn't survive without vendors that have research and development departments that support the end user. so be sure and know that i'm a friend of the vendors. i didn't mean that to any kind of negative light when i called them snake oil salesmen. i hope you know what i was talking about individuals who bring something to the fight that has absolutely no value to it but sell it, are able to sell it. i think the other thing, and we talk about the just a minute ago, we've got to tap into those private industry resources. the federal pipeline, the federal money stream for research and development for these kind of things is very limited, and i call it the snooze alarm effect. the bp event takes place or exxon valdez or hurricane katrina and we start to focus on that, what were the problems? how do we resolve

them? the alarm goes off and wakes us up. six months from now the alarm goes up and we tap the snooze and sleep ten minutes. a year from now we slap the snooze three more times and sleep for 30 minutes. we lose the passion and enthusiasm based upon the event. so we've got to engage the private industry who not only has the funding for it, but also has the greatest risk and greatest possibility for lost revenue in the event that you have another event like this. >> yes, ma'am. >> i'm wendy walsh, i'm from the naval post graduate of school. when this event first rolled out there was a lot confusion on the emergency management side. it was different because it is a oil spill and there are different regulations how you respond and where is the stafford act what we're hearing. when you bring up the issue, admiral, what if this was a terrorist attack happening?

how would we respond and how would the emergency management or the control, command and control be different in that type of event and how are we preparing for that so that emergency management is ready? >> that's a great question. one of the things that is built into the emergency system that we use for hurricanes or we youed for terrorist attacks is the esf-ten which is the emergency support function for oil and hazard does materials built right into the larger emergency response system. and, so the, the consequence of that is oil or hazardous materials of any event, whether it's, could be a storm. we mentioned the tanks that failed during katrina. or it could be a blowout or could be a terrorist attack, it's going to be pretty much the same. i think the, you know, one

of the challenges is, if, if it's not a, a responsible party situation like we had here, and, it exceeds our oil spill liability and trust fund, then we've got a little bit of a challenge there. but it's, i think, the biggest challenge really is that. is the funding. there should not be a problem with access to the response equipment, to, the organizational structure, to the scientific support, to the communications system. i think, you know, it's fortunate that we, that we actually are all multi-mission for the most part. so those of us that are trained and in responding to oil and hazardous materials are typically the same people that are going to be responding to a terrorist

event or an earthquake or a hurricane. . . connections that it takes to

go from a 4-inch cam lock on our national guard tankers to our -- to put water into our public drinking system so that's a simple example. when i looked at what my risks are and what my responsibility to be ready to respond to that risk and do i have the ability or do i need to engage my private industry? for instance, we have a lot of

tornadoes come through. we have a lot of flooding typically when we're not in this drought situation so i've engaged one of my vendors is granger, lowe's what do you have in stock when i say i need it and we'll worry about it to pay for it year but to engage with the industries that you need gua the government agencies aren't typically going to have that. i guess they're running us off. >> they're giving us the warning. it's 11:30. i believe there's a lunch break now. [laughter] >> and i appreciate everyone's attendance here. i thought there was some great questions and i particularly want to thank the panel if we could give them one last round of applause. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] >> as this event comes to a close we want to remind you that if you missed any of it it's available online from the c-span video library, c-span.org. and we have a lot of other live events to tell you on the c-span networks today. coming up in just a couple minutes, about half an hour, president obama will be speaking to the american legion national convention in minneapolis.

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♪ ♪ >> the president of france and the prime minister of england announced recently that their governments will regularly produce statistics on the happiness and well-being of their people. they claim these statistics will be useful in creating public policy. well, coming up we take you to

the aspen institute's seventh annual idea festival on a discussion whether happiness should shape public policy in the u.s. panelists include derek book and daniel gilbert of harvard university. this is just over an hour. [applause] >> so i'm dan gilbert and i will repeat something i said last track in case you weren't there which is about six months ago aide dream come true when kitty boon of ideas festival called and said would it be possible to convince you to come to aspen with the interesting most interesting people you know and sit in the sunshine and listen to them work hard while you didn't? and the joy of being with your friends is only surpassed by watching other people work hard while you don't. so it's my great pleasure to be moderating these sessions. and in particular moving from this morning's session on what human beings as individuals might do to increase their own personal happiness to the big question of what government and

policymakers might do to increase the happiness of citizens. in the last decade this conversation about, you know, public policy and happiness has kind of moved among economists, psychologists and policymakers from happiness? what does that have to do with public policy to what could else public policy be about? and there's a range of opinions between. we all agree, i think, that public policies are not meant to promote misery. they're, obviously, meant to promote something like its opposite. good policies are those which do and bad poles are those that don't and the question that arises and again what we'll talk about today is whether what we're learning about happiness from science as many place in shaping our public policies, can it? should it? and that's what both of these two gentlemen are going to help us think about today. we have the william todd university professor in the public of affairs in the department of psychology and the woodrow wilson school of public and international affairs at

princeton university. i suspect you don't have a card. [laughter] >> it would be very long if you did. his research focuses on human decision-making and it's at the intersection of sicoli and behavior economics even before there was such a thing called behavior economics and recently his work on decision-making has been put to good use in trying to understand the problem of probability. how to apply behavioral to policy. and his ideas 42 if i understand correctly is sort of a think tank that uses behavioral science that uses real world problems such as how poor people can get access to financial institutions, how people should choose health care coverage, how to improve educational opportunities in low-incomed communities et cetera. so a great pleasure to have him sitting beside me and a great pleasure to not have to talk after him. and we have a research professor at harvard university.

before that, he taught in the law school and then he was the dean for the law school and for 20 years he was our president. despite all his great service to harvard, we have refused to give the guy a break so he continues to come back and teach courses and actually continues to come back and occasionally becomes president. [laughter] >> in his spare time while he's not busy being our president, and leading other institutions, he's written about 10 books on the state of higher education, including most recently our underachieving colleges, a candid look at how much students learn and why they should be learning more. the title tells you a lot about his thesis. his most recent book to my great delight is the politics of happiness what government can learn from the new research on well-being. so without taking any more time, i'm going to turn the floor over to eldar and he'll talk for maybe 20 minutes or so. derek will do the same and we'll have a little bit of a

discussion and we'll bring you in. >> okay. it's a pleasure. i'm used to working with powerpoints and dan said i could bring pictures and i'm learning it's not the norm here. bob will help me work through this. so my plan -- i'm going to assume without discussing the research for now, that policy outcomes, whether it's access to emergency medical and access to the poor can improve well-being if done well and i'm going to try to convince you that more behavioral insights when we do policy can make better policy and i'm going to start with psych 101 that informs my thinking about this. i'm going to talk a bit about policy implications and then i'll give you a few minutes about the recent work we've been doing particularly with my colleague and friend and our post doctoral students about the policy in particular and how it

might inform policy in ways we think is important. i see this agenda, this discussion in general is involving two conflicting views of the human agent. the views that have come to know and love from policies of school and economics in other areas is some form of the rational internet model even in the mild version. it basically assumes people are well-informed. the stable and well-known profile and if you give them a rich market they seem to be fairly well maximizing their preferences and doing the best they can with their tastes. to a large extent we need to step away and let them do what they need to do. that's one extreme. and the other side is the view that we get from behavioral and per experimental research that discovers that, you know, our preferences are not so stable and our stabilities can be quite mediocre and the implications

are different and people are not always good at even maximizing their own things -- the things they want themselves, they might not always know what's best for them and in general they could really benefit from some attention and some help. obviously, paternalism arise and we can discuss them maybe later. my point today is to try to convince you that both these views have these merits so that basically the first view is the one that guides policymaking. that's what we teach our policymakers and policy schools in the economics department and the second view ought to inform policymaking a lot more than it typically does and could increase well-being substantially and that's what i'll try to convince you. i'm and it's entered the public culture and some have seen a version of it but i'll give you more. these are european psychologist whose come to the u.s. sometime around -- or after the second world war obsessed with the understanding that made the german mind the mind that it

was. they ran a number of remarkable studi studies. it's remarkable when you look at the correspondence, he's stunned and he planned to fund the infinite and he's funding the rever reverse. he recruits middle age men in new haven to come to the basement of the psychology department at yale to volunteer to study. they think they're being randomly assigned into teachers. and he's attached to electrodes and the teacher and the subjects in the black administers some silly paired study. i teach house banana later when i say house you say banana and you get it right and you move on

and if you get it wrong i give you a shock with a very special machine. and as the experiment progresses i give you a shock. and it gets pretty strong shocks as we go. this is very carefully so it would be 70 to 100 volts. and there are grunts and it gets louder. at 150 volts the student screams get me out of here. i told you i had heart trouble which he happened to mentioned when they first meet. at 270 there's screams of agony. at 330 if you choose to go that far you say house, nothing comes back but silence. 340, 350. if you choose to go along with this game it goes from 350 and 450 there's just silence. why would anybody do this. there's a picture in the white who works at the university who knows what's going on. this ought to go on. and he puts some pressure to be a good subject and keeps going. so that's a study -- he had a

beautiful idea. he wanted -- he asked people to predict what would people do in this study so he gave them all the descriptions that i gave you with much more detail with all the new ones and after he described everything and asked you what would people do. everybody predicts disobedience. the average prediction is 145 volts. when the grunts get louder people will refuse to go on. no one predicts that anybody will go above 300 except for the psychiatrists, and the experiments of human behavior and will be a sociopath. those are the predictions. 65% of sociopaths and that everybody goes above 300. now, we can easily spend time on this study and i'll give you a couple of my main points. first of all, notice this is a genuine discovery about human behavior. we have the data. we didn't know this. the experts did not know this 50 years ago. and along with the fact that it's a study on human behavior

we just learned how to incorporate this view of how we are. most of us in the room suspect that we'd be among the few who refuse and most of us are profoundly wrong about that. and we just -- it's very hard to get it, it's hard to understand it. if you sake psych 101 and read about abu ghraib, you say this is not horrible people and it's about average people and very hard to do and no matter how much we try i just brought you one picture these are folks on a day break from working the gas chambers in auschwitz. it just doesn't compute. we can't get the idea the context that we can get regular people, nice people that are unfathomable. and less in social psych it doesn't have to be so powerful. the context doesn't have to be so strong. this is a very benign one. this cable shows the percentage of drivers in different european countries who are willing organ drivers. what percentage are willing to donate their organs. the blue countries average 94%.

the yellow countries average 14%. what's the difference in these countries? we have austria on one side, germany on the other, france, netherlands, belgium. the blue countries are the opt out unless you choose out. and the yellow is if you choose in you're not a donor. the transaction costs of opting in and out is signing the back of your driver's license and what we're seeing here, 94% of the blue countries we're talking people on the left and on the right and religious and not religious and young and old, men and women and all that doesn't seem to matter if we have a conflicts that makes it much easier by default to be an organ donor all the rest seems to matter very little as opposed to the yellow countries. and that is -- if you notice puts a real onus on the policymakers because we see here with a light switch of what otherwise seems to be relevant, the policymaker can turn a

country into a country where everybody is a donor turning into a country where everybody is not with almost no cost and no work. this is a beautiful quote. this is over 100 years old. the economists and here i'm adding the policymaker, teacher, parent, taxi driver, it doesn't matter who, in an attempt to ignore psychology but its sheer impossibility to ignore human nature if he or she -- i tried to lack of sexists and it remains true of economic matter if he does he will not avoid psychology rather he'll be forced to make his own and it will be bad psychology. the idea is you can come up with intuitive psychology but you'll be doing bad policy. let me give you a couple of quick examples of bad psychology. two tier welfare law was a law held in 15 states in the union until three years ago. the supreme court stuck it out because it validated the freedom to travel completely irrelevant

consideration and they lamented some of them having to give up this law. what this law says if you're a welfare recipient moving from state a to state b and state pays higher level welfare payments for first 12 months of residents you're entitled only to state a level payments for the lower payments. what's the idea. and we train policymakers to make this way and people try to maximize the welfare recipient the mother of two surfs the web and she sees where she pay her most and she hops on her suv and drive to higher paying states. all you have to do is check the data and you discover that, in fact, mobility from lower to higher paying states equaled to higher to lower states. why do people move. they affidavit babysitter or a job or somebody to help them. this is 1993 dollars if you're a mother struggling in

mississippi, what this policy did instead of giving you 656 it gives you 120 which guaranteed your demise and so you have a policy structure based on the assumption that people move for payments and people, in fact, move for other reasons and don't even know about the payments and you will have destroyed them. another acute one a friend of mine did this in canadian hospitals. there was a problem. the homeless come to emergency rooms a lot. the emergency rooms is costly and it's a problem. what do we do? the assumption is that the homeless come to the emergency rooms because it's a warm place where you can get a cup of coffee. but there's another possibility. the other possibility is that they don't feel well and they need help and what these guys did they randomly assigned people to compassionatal or conventional care. either you got the care you always got or randomly assigned you got a very compassionate version of care with somebody sitting next of you and took care of and you made sure you got all the attention that you needed, et cetera. these people returned the next

time by a third when you treated them well as opposed to when you treated them badly. it turns out the emergency rooms are just not fun enough for a cup of coffee. these people come here because they don't feel well if you make them feel like they've been taken care of they're less likely to come and if you ignore them in a cost-effective way they come more often. very much the intuition that often guides policymaking in the emergency room. okay. a couple minutes on poverty. there's a lot of stories about poverty. there's a psychology about poverty that's very unique. it has to do basically with the difficulties of budgeting your life. basically, it's about not having any money. but it's based on some very special psychology that is very unique. i'll give you a simple intuition. when we conduct our daily lives when we go and buy books and cds and dinners and breakfast we don't ask ourselves what we are not buying instead. we act as if we have an infinite supply of money for small items. if you're poor, you ask yourself

whether or not you question what you pay anything else over a muffins. it not only diminishes the enjoyment you get but it's depleting it's distracting and it requires attention. it's a very difficult life. so we have a lot of work on this that we're preparing for a book. but let me give you two facts. one, two facts about being poor, one, you don't have enough money and so you have a lot of complicated tradeoffs budgeting decisions that are distracting and demanding. two, it's a very unhappy identity. it's just not fun. so we're here at the aspen institute there's something that infringes on our identity. we feel fortunate. you feel like the world is open to new ideas. it gives you courage, it gives you hope. it's remarkable. being poor is exactly not that. it's exactly the thing that it's hard and you can't make it. that you struggle, that you fail. there's a threat to your identity that's very effective, and i'll give you an example. the first one about budgeting we go to people in the mall in new

jersey, and we ask them to participate in the study. they sit down in front of a computer, we give them scenarios about budgeting difficulties. and let's call them difficult and easy. some decisions are difficult. the car breaks down. it's going to going to cost you $1500 to fix. while you're thinking about even how you're going to take care of this financial problem, which will then tell you at the end to keep you busy and entertained we'll give you a couple games to play on the computer. these games are well-known experimental manipulations from cognizant psychology. the first one is about cognitive control. it has to do with some responses. when you see the heart on the left you respond to the left. you see the flower on the right you respond to the left. it's confusing. it's distracting. it's a test of divided attention. the one on the right this is a very well-known test when you do on iq. think of a driving test and a

intelligence test. we'll give you the financial problems to think about while you're thinking about them we'll give you these tests and by the way it's controlled -- we give people also the same problems of 1500 but not about money but mathematical problems shepherds and goats to control for the fact that it's not numeric math phobia that's doing this but actual budgeting concerns. there's a lot here i'll go quickly. let's divide our respondents by self-reported income from rich and poor and those above the median whether you give them an difficult problem or an easy problem whether it's mathematical -- whether it's financial or not has no difference. they perform on the intelligence and the driving tests the same way. if you look at the below median people, the nonbudgetary problems look just fine and the problems are easy not much happens. all the work happens when you give a poor person a difficult budgetary problem. notice the performance goes down

significantly. you give a low-incomed person a budgetary concern they drive less well and they are more stupid. they do less well on an iq test. that suggests when i go through life thinking about what do i do with my kid, do i send a trip or buy lunch or shirt a school uniform that makes me a distracted and less attentive person and i do less intelligent on a intelligence test. there's obviously a contrast between rich and poor and we do all the controls. it's not a problem in this study but to make it even more pretty we found a case where we can do it with subjects. because they failed to smooth they tend to be rich in the harvest and before. they give them these tests. and they do and they're more stupid before the harvest than after that.

they just perform less well. so we can control for and do automatic deductions and guaranteed incomes. support, a lot of things we can do to make the budgetary concerns and difficulties of poor. >> lawful permanent resident of the u.s. with a valid and current i688.

please do not -- [inaudible] [laughter] what just happened? you get 36 pages of this, then you're reminded if you err anywhere, you're doing this under the penalty of perjury, and then you're told -- this is a quote, tell me when the last time somebody said this to you -- you will not be seen if you are since minutes later. [laughter] so you take an application, you treat them as a ph.d., a criminal and a baby and take up of benefits programs is low. and it's partly because if you think of benefits, you think a person realizes they want food stamps, how much is that worth an hour? another $12, what's the problem? that's not the right way to think about it. you create this obstacle that completely distorts and ruins people's chances to apply for benefits that otherwise they would have done had you been behaviorally more insightful.

okay. last couple slides. the poor identity. the beautiful work particularly on african-american kids by claude and his colleagues, these are people who walk into an environment with a stereotype threat about who they are and how they'll perform. if you affirm them or convince the task is irrelevant to identity, they do substantially better. few identities are worse than poor. some places in the world it's bad to be jewish, black, gypsy, everywhere we've looked, and my colleagues have done massive studies, the worst it can be is poor and homeless. they're untrustworthy, incapable, unclean, it's a disaster. they're aware of it. it's a stereotype, and they perform accordingly. so let's affirm them. what we do here isn't soup kitchens in trenton. people come for a meal, on the way out standard information is done in writing, but they don't always write so well, so they

walk into a room, and they speak for 30 seconds into a tape. and they describe the meal they had, in the experimental case they describe something that affirms them, something recently they've experienced that made them feel good. on the way out we make available two kind of benefits packages for which these people are eligible, and we simply o serve how many take them -- observe how many take them. i have no illusion, these are packages that are difficult. but if you just look at how many avail themselves of the package, okay, i'll try, it goes from 16-46%. they're three times more likely to take this package if you befriend them for 30 seconds than just let them feel the way they do. and finally you'll recognize this, we