Woeful delays on a national tragedy

Try to wrap your brain around these numbers: It has been 35 days since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 people, and began pumping tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico - a total sum so far of 7 million gallons with no reliable end in sight.

It's hard to know which fact is more astounding. That we couldn't plug an oil well in more than a month? That we're still scratching our heads over solutions? That so much oil is befouling the oceans, the Louisiana and Florida coastlines and devastating the livelihoods of the people who live there? That a company could be allowed to build an oil rig just a few miles off the coast of the nation with no knowledge of how to cap the well if a disaster occurred?

Or, that the president of the United States, set to make a second flyover Friday before coming home to Chicago for a Memorial Day vacation, has yet to declare a national emergency?

Today, BP is scheduled at last to try to plug the leak by driving heavy mud into the well, a complicated and uncertain strategy that at least is something. But even if BP's "top kill" works, it has taken too long, for it is simply unconscionable that this or any well could be built without a plan that could have plugged this leak a month ago.

Reasonable Americans cannot help but share Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's frustration, expressed after flying over the area himself on Monday, with BP's lack of progress in getting control of the oil spill. But they also cannot help but share the frustration of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal with the slow federal response.

BP and government bureaucrats point out that the problem they are dealing with is unprecedented and that they are doing everything they can think of to try to stop the gusher and clean up the spill. Yet, we have to ask, if there are 1,000 ships skimming oil around the disaster site today, why are there not 2,000? If there are miles of booms soaking up oil, why are there not hundreds of miles of booms soaking up oil? Why, of all things. must Louisiana have to wait for permits to start building berms to save its coastline?

And, amid all this, where is President Obama and his own sense of urgency? If this crisis were happening on George Bush's watch, Obama and his supporters would be among the first and loudest decrying the incompetence of the federal response. Yet, the personal involvement of the president so far appears to be a flyover of the scene and the dispatching - a month later - of a high-level delegation to repeat their statements of inadequacy and frustration.

Of course, BP and the government want to stop this oil flow "as soon as possible." But there seems to be a huge disconnect over what "as soon as possible" means. And that gives us little confidence that the key longer-term solutions needed here - both a commitment that BP will have to pay, in Durbin's phrase, "every penny" of the cost of cleanup and a re-examination of the permits for every oil rig drilling off an American coast to make sure something like this could not happen again - will ever occur.