Obama under fire for grossly underestimating Gulf oil spill

The Obama administration lost the public trust and may have sabotaged clean-up operations in the Gulf of Mexico by grossly underestimating the amount of oil gushing from BP's broken Macondo well, according to a White House commission appointed to investigate the spill. In a scathing critique of the administration's handling of the disaster, the two co-chairs of the commission yesterday said government officials made a serious blunder by releasing early estimates of the spill that were about 60 times too low. "It's a little bit like Custer underestimating the number of Indians on the other side of the hill and paying a price for that," Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida, told reporters. Government agencies have come under sustained assault from independent scientists for initial estimates that put the size of the spill as low as 1,000 barrels a day–even as footage from the ocean floor showed a huge cloud of oil and gas billowing out of the BP well. A team of scientific experts assembled by the government eventually raised the estimate to more than 60,000 barrels a day. In testimony yesterday, the coast guard commander Admiral Thad Allen insisted the underestimates had had no effect on the response. "The answer is no," Allen said. "We assumed at the outset this would be a catastrophic event."