The next evening, Nungesser joined Cooper on the air and told him what the President had said.

“He didn’t actually say that,” Cooper said.

“Yes, sir,” Nungesser said. “Yes, he did—”

“Wait,” Cooper said. “He said call—he said—that’s funny!”

But Nungesser said, “I truly believe that he cares.” He added, “We’re behind the cleanup now.”

Nungesser did not keep himself away from CNN for long, and soon his criticism returned in force. By June, he was telling people, “Thad Allen is a fucking idiot, to put it mildly.” But Allen was quietly bringing greater command and control to the massive effort. He had convened a group of specialists to measure the oil coming out of the wellhead. (They estimated that the rate was as high as sixty-two thousand barrels per day.) He tripled the number of Coast Guard officers deployed throughout the Gulf—a decision that put a strain on the service. He reorganized Vessels of Opportunity, a program that hired local boats to help with the response, which had grown to more than ten thousand craft—“everything from a canoe to a professionally licensed offshore vessel,” the officer who oversaw it told me. The response enlisted the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to track boom, using technology that the military employs for battle-damage assessments. Furthermore, Allen told the President that he wanted to take control over the Gulf airspace. “We had eight near-midair collisions,” Allen told me. “There were planes flying out for logistics, spotter planes, planes spraying dispersants. There were Air National Guard planes flying. NASA was flying planes.” He adopted the system used during the Haitian earthquake; the Air Force lent him the personnel, and began coördinating the hundreds of daily flights from Tyndall Air Force Base, in Florida.

On June 1st, Allen held the roundtable discussion on the question of the berms. “We were put in a pretty bad spot,” he told me. “We were having a meeting based on a proposal that was made to the President, regarding a project that was approaching four hundred million dollars, and we had to get this thing resolved in four or five days—the case that built up in the media was so extraordinary that it required some resolution. That’s not the best way to run operations.” At first, only scientists and technical experts had a chance to speak, and throughout the discussion Nungesser fidgeted. During a break, he recalled, he confronted Allen. “I said, ‘Admiral Allen, this is bullshit. This is a dog-and-pony show. I am calling the President.’ ” Then he stormed out and spoke with TV reporters in the hallway. “I’m sick to my stomach,” he said. “We ought to have some of the dead animals in there.”

When Nungesser came back, Allen said, “We’re going to let the parish presidents and the Governor speak five minutes each.” The local officials clapped, and when Jindal spoke Nungesser wept. The next day, Allen informed Jindal that BP had agreed to spend three hundred and sixty million dollars on the project. When an official at the Interior Department suspended the dredging for one berm until it could be conducted with fewer environmental risks, Nungesser threatened to mail her an oiled pelican carcass.

The fight over the berms obscured real improvements. Many of the logistical problems that had hampered the earliest phase of the response were being resolved. BP began to acquire matériel on a vast scale. Every week, responders were using roughly three million hazmat suits, far more than the world’s supply, so Logistics teams scoured the globe for stockpiles and alternatives to make up for the shortfall. When the manufacturer of the dispersants, Nalco, could not make the chemical fast enough, BP helped with its supply chain. The company spent money liberally. “Supply and demand kind of goes out the window,” one BP responder told me. “We understood and tolerated and even smiled when we paid ten, twenty, thirty per cent above market.” By midsummer, more than eight hundred skimmers had been mobilized by the shore and around the wellhead. “This was the largest offshore-skimming operation in the history of spill response,” Laferriere told me. The burning operations were removing millions of gallons of oil. About as much oil was incinerated in the Gulf as had spilled from the Exxon Valdez. Louisiana officials, meanwhile, opened barriers restraining the Mississippi River; the water’s outward force appears to have greatly prevented the oil from penetrating too deeply into certain bayous. By June, most of the thick crude had been removed from Pass a Loutre.

Still, the threat of the oil lingered. In late June, NOAA predicted gusts of wind surging from sea toward land, prompting dread that masses of crude would assault the Louisiana shoreline. Laferriere, frustrated by allegations that Houma was not acting with enough urgency, and wanting to keep the morale of his officers buoyed, sent an e-mail to all of his responders. “Now we will be fully tested,” he told them. “Despite our best efforts, oil may go beyond our defenses. We must not be discouraged, but fall back to those areas of impact, and attack the oil, quickly and aggressively, and ensure the oil is removed from these shores and marshes with uncommon quickness. We are not unlike the three hundred warriors that stood at the Hot Gates of the Battle of Thermopylae, under King Leonidas, who faced tens of thousands of Persians. They were outnumbered, but they didn’t give up. They fought till the end, as we will. They fought for a way of life, and we are fighting for a way of life.”

VI. THE CHEMICALS

Even as Laferriere tried to motivate his responders for an all-out assault upon the coastline, he recognized that the principal fight against the oil was offshore, to be conducted with a weapon—dispersants—that many people thought was more harmful than the spill itself. “How do you view the various technologies and their ability to fight oil?” he said. “There are really two components to that. One is: How much oil do they take out of the environment? How much oil can be skimmed or burned or dispersed? Then, there is another factor that is equally important: What is the ‘encounter rate’ of the technology? Remember, the oil on the water is about a millimetre thick. Its area is huge. So if you can only go about a knot, which is the average skimming capacity, and less than a knot when you are burning, it is not possible, physically, even with all the vessels in the world, to keep up with the spreading of the oil.” Skimming is virtually impossible with waves of more than six feet, and burning is difficult with three-foot waves. Dispersants, on the other hand, make use of chaotic seas; the ocean’s natural energy helps the oil break up and dissolve. “A dispersant plane can go a hundred and forty knots,” Laferriere continued. “It can cover a huge area. There was a huge slick off the Chandeleur Islands. It got away from our skimmers; it got away from the burning vessels. What’s the option? We could disperse it, or let it hit the islands.”

It was commonly reported that BP was making decisions—often in secret—about where to spray dispersants. Rolling Stone claimed that “BP decided to wage chemical warfare in the Gulf.” In fact, the Unified Command made the decisions jointly. “It’s a team effort,” Laferriere told me. “But I am also the police officer right there.” Scientists like Ed Levine helped plan the sorties, and Coast Guard officers monitored them. Charlie Huber, an independent contractor who managed the spraying, told me, “BP was not coming down and saying, ‘Spray here, and spray there.’ ”

There were echoes of the Boom Wars in the debate over dispersants. Alarmist criticism easily earned credibility. At a hearing about the spill, Representative Jerrold Nadler, from New York, argued that lives were being endangered. “There is no scientific evidence that dispersants can be effective in oil spills of this magnitude,” he claimed, inaccurately. “But these chemicals make it harder to track how much oil is there, and where it’s going, and thus to determine liability.” He said that the dispersants reminded him of Agent Orange, and expressed concern that responders were conducting “an uncontrolled experiment that could result in thousands and thousands of people getting sick or dying as a result of the cleanup”—he emphasized, jabbing a pointed finger—“not of the original disaster.”

Scientists and activists spoke of the dispersants as if they had been concocted in a weapons lab. “Goes right through skin,” Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist, asserted on CNN, adding that the chemicals had caused one shrimper to start “bleeding from the rectum.” Some locals wondered if the chemicals had spawned a disease. “It is commonly being called the Blue Flu, because the alleged symptoms include blue lips and skin, and it’s scaring the hell out of people,” one blogger wrote. A television reporter in Alabama did a segment in which a chemist speculated, without giving any evidence, that dispersants in seawater by a marina may have caused a sample to unexpectedly combust. A common rumor held that BP had been spraying dispersants at night to sink the oil—even though there were no nighttime sorties. “Why don’t we stop spreading the dispersants, let it come to the surface, and let’s fight it where we can see it?” Nungesser told Anderson Cooper one night. “Let’s get every ship from around the country, around the world—put ’em out there.”

For the people who live in the Gulf, the fear of dispersants often blended with rage and frustration of a broader type: concerns about unpaid bills, restrictions on fishing, the demise of a way of life. Late in the spill, at a town-hall meeting on Grand Isle, a BP representative named Jason French sat behind a folding table at the front of a room full of locals. During the meeting, a thickset seafood supplier named Dean Blanchard stood and spoke about his hardships. “Y’all didn’t give me enough money to pay my bills,” he said, adding, “How do you expect a man to live on less than ten per cent of what he was projected to make?” After speaking for several minutes, Blanchard sat down. “Y’all not trying to pick up that oil!” he yelled. “Come on, man. It’s a joke.”

French attempted to allay everyone’s concerns. “Our task forces are looking for oil each day,” he said. “I understand the anger, and I understand the frustration.” He tapped the table nervously with his finger. “But someone’s gonna have to explain to me why BP doesn’t want to clean up this oil. This was not—”

Many locals complained that the government was ceding control of operations to BP. Admiral Thad Allen said, “Reality had no place in portions of this response.” Photograph by Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images

“Because it’s more cost-effective for y’all to come at night and sink the son of a bitch!” Blanchard shouted. “Y’all send the planes, and y’all fucking sink it!” He sat back down. “What do you think, we’re stupid?” The room went silent, and his voice had grown hoarse. “Y’all are putting the oil on the bottom of our fishing grounds!” he screamed. “Y’all are messing me up for the rest of my life. I ain’t gonna live long enough to buy any more shrimp!”

The fear of using chemicals to clean up large marine oil spills is nearly as old as the spills themselves. When the Torrey Canyon ran aground, in 1967, the response team dumped an industrial detergent called BP1002 into the slick. British Petroleum, as the company was known at the time, had designed the chemical to degrease and clean its equipment, and the hope was that it would cause the spilled oil to break up into manageable amounts. At the time, no one knew how dangerous the detergent was, or even how to apply it; the chemical was dribbled from hoses and dumped in barrels from cliff tops. Seven hundred thousand gallons of BP1002 were used during the spill, and scientists later concluded that this had done more harm than good.

Shortly after the Torrey Canyon incident, chemists began to search for less toxic and more effective alternatives, and, in 1968, a scientist named Gerard Canevari, with Esso, created the original formula for Corexit, the dispersant that was used in the BP spill. Early experiments showed that half a gallon of it could break up fifty gallons of oil into tiny droplets; toxicity tests that the company had commissioned were encouraging. Canevari, who is now retired, spent most of his professional life refining Corexit’s various formulas. He told me that he based some of the dispersant’s ingredients on food-grade additives that had F.D.A. approval. “You have ingested some of the components of it,” he said. The formula used most widely in the Gulf, Corexit 9500, has seven main ingredients, each of which can be found in products that Americans handle regularly, including Klondike bars, Lubriderm, and ibuprofen. Sorbitan monooleate, for instance, is in juices and shampoos, and hydrotreated light-petroleum distillates can be found in air fresheners.

At one point during the spill, a blogger wrote on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, “I was disturbed to get another anonymous tip that Corexit 9500 also has dihydrogen monoxide, but I can’t confirm this because Nalco will not reveal if dihydrogen monoxide is in fact a secret ingredient in Corexit 9500.” The blogger explained that the chemical was “really bad and nasty stuff,” used in explosives and poisonous compounds. “It mutates DNA, denatures proteins, disrupts cell membranes, and chemically alters critical neurotransmitters.” Dihydrogen monoxide—better known by its chemical symbol, H2O—is plain water.

Dispersants don’t remove oil from the sea, but they are designed to help nature do so. “We often lose faith when considering the power of Mother Nature to remove oil or pollutants from the environment,” Laferriere told me. Ocean-borne bacteria consume floating hydrocarbon molecules that are common in certain parts of the sea. When the oil is dispersed, its over-all surface area is increased, and this allows more bacteria to consume it at once, speeding up the process. (Imagine a cake the size of a house, and a hundred thousand people trying to wolf it down at once; then imagine that cake cut into slices and passed around to the same crowd.) After the microorganisms eat the oil, it is essentially purged from the ecosystem. It’s difficult to predict whether Corexit will advance this process in every circumstance. In some experiments, microorganisms appear to eat only portions of the oil, leaving the rest behind. In others, they consume all of it, or none of it. In the Gulf of Mexico, where there are so many natural oil seeps, and so many forms of bacteria that feed on them, there was every reason to think that the chemicals would work as intended.

The decision to use dispersants was made on April 21st, while the rig was still aflame. Right away, a specially equipped C-130 from Arizona was sent to Houma, and a smaller King Air BE-90 aircraft in Mississippi was put at the ready. The use of dispersants is standard practice in the U.S. The E.P.A. maintains a list of them that are approved for spraying in oil spills, and Corexit had already been used at least seven times in the Gulf. In 1979, a rig called Ixtoc-I blew out in Bahia de Campeche, in Mexico, causing a massive spill, and two and a half million gallons of Corexit were deployed to fight it—considerably more than was used in the BP spill.

On April 22nd, David Fritz told me, “a member of the strike team walked in at around two in the morning and asked what our dispersant plan was. We were, like, ‘Here are the approval forms,’ and he was, like, ‘No, I want to see your plans.’ So we cobbled something together.” That day, the first sortie released about eighteen hundred gallons of dispersant into the water. The forms made it clear that the chemicals could be used off the coast of Louisiana if they were sprayed more than three miles from the shoreline, but did not say how much could be used. In a matter of days, with no regulatory limit, the sorties were spraying as much as forty thousand gallons a day over the Gulf.

BP had an obvious interest in maintaining the spraying, and the responders at Houma believed that fears about the chemicals should be addressed by patient explanation. But the E.P.A.’s leadership believed that the response would be fundamentally unsuccessful if it did not accommodate itself more directly to public anxieties. The rifts threatened to cripple the Unified Command. “Just as I could not have BP walk out, I could not have the E.P.A. walk out,” Admiral Landry, the federal on-scene coördinator for the early part of the response, told me. These tensions were not expressed publicly, but they shaped the way the response added 1.8 million gallons of Corexit to the sea.

VII. HURRICANE BP

The administrator of the E.P.A., Lisa Jackson, is a chemical engineer with degrees from Tulane and Princeton. She grew up in New Orleans, in the Lower Ninth Ward. Her education at Tulane was funded by a Shell Oil Company scholarship, and in the summers she interned at the company. She is a proponent of environmental justice—the notion that minorities and the poor, who suffer from pollution disproportionately, should have a say in policy. “I believe that those who are often impacted by environmental problems have the least voice, the least political power, ability, or even knowledge, to get into the process, and one of my priorities at the E.P.A. is to expand the conversation on environmentalism,” she told me. During tours of the state, she listened to Louisianans affected by the spill, and sometimes even gave them her phone number.

Jackson believed that the response could not escape local history. It is hard to hear the word “Katrina” and not think of the Superdome in a desperate state, of people stranded, seemingly ignored, while the President told the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “You’re doing a heckuva job.” Katrina destroyed Jackson’s mother’s home, and Jackson drove her mother and relatives to safety. Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon caught fire, Jackson flew to the Gulf, and from her plane she wrote a blog post, which she never published, titled “Hurricane BP.” She determined that the E.P.A. would demonstrate to Louisiana that the federal government was listening. Her decisions on dispersants, she told me, would have to be “driven in many ways by public concerns,” because “the issue, whether rightly or wrongly, was one that was very much in the front of many people’s minds down there.” During one meeting with Obama, she spoke almost apologetically about her position. “Mr. President, with regard to dispersants, I am probably going to be the skunk at the picnic,” she said. “Sir, I am going to be out there asking very hard questions.” Obama told her, “That’s exactly what I expect you to do.”

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At first, Jackson knew little about dispersants, so she called a former professor at Tulane who had researched them, and he introduced her to other academics. “We all reach back to people who know a lot more than we do,” she told me. When spills occur in water, the primary responsibility for the cleanup falls to the Coast Guard, and the E.P.A. plays a secondary role—for instance, monitoring air pollution, overseeing waste management, and deciding which dispersants may be used. Early in the response, she told reporters that using Corexit was permissible. “If it’s on the list and they want to use it, then they are preauthorized, if you will, to do so,” she said. But, as the spill grew, and it became clear that dispersants were being used in a manner that the regulations had not anticipated, Jackson came under intense political pressure to act aggressively. Admiral Allen told me, “We went to a congressional briefing with over a hundred members of Congress, and I saw the anger and frustration over the use of dispersants, and they were being levelled straight at her.”

Much of the consternation about dispersants emerged early in the spill, when an ExxonMobil chemical engineer who had joined the response suggested that Corexit be injected into the oil directly over the wellhead, at the ocean floor. In the late nineteen-sixties, Gerard Canevari, the inventor of Corexit, had tested the chemical’s application underwater in the Gulf. “We dispersed the oil subsea, and we never saw it again,” he told me. In 1970, he said, subsea dispersants were used for a well blowout in the Mississippi Delta, but the procedure was never mentioned in a scientific journal, and very few people knew of it.

Quickly, responders within the Unified Command embraced the idea, even though its implications had barely been studied. The undersea injections could potentially be five times as efficient as spraying, and promised to improve safety. When the oil rushed to the surface, it spread and evaporated, releasing toxic vapors. On some days, these vapors became so dangerous that firefighting tugboats were brought in to use water cannons to push oil away from vessels working to kill the well. When this was ineffective, the vessels had to be evacuated. The vapors were “an overwhelming health hazard, and an explosive hazard,” Ed Overton, the NOAA consultant, told me. Dispersing the oil undersea was likely to cause less of it to come to the surface, reducing the danger.