Hooray for engineers

Guess what, folks?  It wasn't government that stopped the oil spill.  It was a team of engineers at BP.  A cap is in place.  For the moment, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

For the moment.  Then we've got to get back to cleaning up what leaked out.

So what are we doing?

Bobby Jindal was using barges to collect the oil from the water.  Until the U.S. Coast Guard briefly shut them down for not having proof that they had enough life preservers!

Bureaucrats.  Enough said.

Jindal has also pushed for constructing sand berms to protect the Louisiana coastal wetlands from the oil coming on-shore.  The federal government response?  "Let's conduct an environmental impact study first!"

Like I said, bureaucrats.

Then I saw Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night.  Olbermann and his guest, Len Bahr, criticized Jindal's building of the sand berms.  Bahr was an advisor to Jindal until being asked to retire last year.  Bahr's got a 9-point argument against the berms here.  From what I've seen, the man is a coastal science expert.  But what he's got is a theory, not evidence that the berms will compound the problem.  In the midst of a crisis, we can ill afford to be academic about things.  Jindal knows that, and "trained academics" like Bahr strike me to be much like our current Chief Executive:  Incapable of making imperfect decisions based on limited facts in a limited amount of time.

Contrast Bahr's theory with the experience the Dutch bring:  They've excelled at reclaiming land from the North Sea.  And they've held it back.  If anybody knows how to build berms and levees, it's the Dutch.

Experience vs. academic theory.  If you're a leader and everybody's looking to you to lead, what do you do?  Take action that might be wrong in the long term, or paralyze yourself with fear and do nothing?

Bahr wants us to continue to use straw to soak up the oil from the water instead of building berms.  OK, why can't we do BOTH!  A good leader hedges his bets, especially in the absence of the facts.  Does Bahr not understand this?