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Opening Plenary: “A Decade Later, Where We Are at and Where We Are Going: A National Incident Commander Perspective”

Admiral Thad Allen (U.S. Coast Guard, retired), the National Incident Commander (NIC) for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill incident, served as the speaker for the opening plenary session of the Offshore Situation Room (OSR). He opened the talk by affirming that “what we’re really doing [with OSR] is we’re starting a conversation.” The event was an invitation to listen and learn, but most importantly to think about the art of the possible. Admiral Allen then tasked participants with developing answers that would best enhance future resilience and provide direction to take this conversation forward.

Following these initial remarks, Admiral Allen provided participants with his perspectives on changes in the operational environment that have occurred over the past 10 years. He presented a series of propositions to the OSR participants, as summarized below:

• Disasters as exercises in applied civics. Admiral Allen stated that “all disasters, whether they’re natural or manmade, or any complex problem for that matter in government, are really exercises in applied civics.” Disasters test the ability of existing governance and legal frameworks to unify around an objective. But most of all, he added, they test whether we’re providing for the common welfare. He also acknowledged that the ability to create unity of effort, subordinate parochial interests to the good of the American people,

and provide a response that is credible and meets their expectations is becoming increasingly hard.

• The world is not static. Because of constant change occurring around us, Admiral Allen noted that we solve problems and manage risks under conditions of incomplete information, compressed time frames, and future uncertainty. He also pointed to the exacerbating effect of accelerated technological change, and how such progress can outpace domestic and international legal frameworks, doctrines, and standard operating procedures. For example, he would later note how drilling has progressed further offshore and at much deeper depths.
• Complexity as a risk aggravator. Admiral Allen noted, “You know something is complex when all of a sudden, your normal way to attack the problem through applying the law, regulations, and standard operating procedures don’t work to solve the problem.” When presented with these situations, he emphasized the need to adapt, adjust thinking, and challenge presumptions about how things are supposed to work.
• Co-production. Admiral Allen refuted the notion that any single individual, company, organization, or agency can solve a complex problem by itself. One of the hardest lessons he learned during the Deepwater Horizon response was that “the response that will meet the expectations of the American public and the general welfare of society [has] to be coproduced through a unity of effort that’s integrated across all of the stakeholders.” Furthermore, this requires trust, buy-in, and a set of basic principles about the response that everybody can adhere to as the unifying basis for the response.
• Lifelong learning and emotional intelligence. To confront complexity and support co-production, Admiral Allen called attention to two traits. First, he noted that great leaders are lifelong learners. He recounted how on the night the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded he did not know what a blowout preventer was; 3 weeks later, he was standing in the White House press office explaining what it was to the entire world. He attributed lifelong learning as helping maintain the mental agility to learn enough about the technical details rapidly and be viewed as a credible person leading the response. Second, he spoke about emotional intelligence. He spoke to the necessity of looking at the people and communities he

was serving and trying to understand how the disaster had affected them as a critical step in co-production.

• The increasing intersection of the natural and the built environments. Admiral Allen underscored the possibility for unintended consequences as populations and industries expand, leading to intersections between what people do and what nature does. As an example, he pointed to expansion into regions of Africa, which resulted in human exposure to the Ebola virus. Admiral Allen commented on the potential for similar surprises as oil drilling proceeds in deepwater environments. Thus, he emphasized the need to prepare to react readily to the complexity of the situation.
• Transnational risks. Admiral Allen noted, “Whether we like it or not, the traditional physical limits to borders and the traditional functions of sovereign governments don’t always stand up to the risks that have to be dealt with for their publics.” He cited weather, germs, and cyberspace as examples of risks that are agnostic to physical borders before adding that deepwater drilling is not just an issue in the United States.

After describing these propositions, Admiral Allen shifted to sharing a number of lessons based on his reflections on what occurred during the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

• “We were basically fighting the last war during this response.” Admiral Allen noted that they were using tools developed from the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA 90), which was passed after the Exxon Valdez oil incident. Although OPA 90 created a workable legal framework for the Deepwater Horizon response, it was aimed at avoiding an oil tanker accident. Admiral Allen stressed the importance of proactive thinking to get ahead of problems, allowing for the ability to “interrupt the supply chain of trouble.”¹
• The Deepwater Horizon disaster severely tested the National Contingency Plan (NCP), the National Incident Management System, and the Incident Command System. In Admiral Allen’s view, doctrinal challenges remain for spills of national significance—

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¹ Admiral Allen attributed this quote to a former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, using it to encourage OSR participants to find interventions that would prevent incidents from occurring.

or for any large, complex event—which he linked to a continuing lack of integration and role ambiguity. He declared that “there needs to be a repeatable-response doctrinal structure that creates a rebuttable presumption about how these things are going to act and create some expectation in the minds of [the] American people [as to] what they can expect of government.”

• Additionally, Admiral Allen noted that the Deepwater Horizon disaster challenged the presumption of a geographically based response structure centered on the Coast Guard Captain of the Port, port zones, and the predesignated federal on-scene coordinator (FOSC).² If Admiral Allen were to do it over again, he would have organized the response structure along the lines of functional objectives. More broadly, he emphasized the need to build in flexibility that allows responders to solve the problems they are facing in the most effective manner.
• Admiral Allen noted that one of the biggest problems he had during the Deepwater Horizon disaster was “the political and social nullification” of the NCP.³ He highlighted two contributing factors in this regard. First, the concept of a responsible party was not well understood by the political leadership. The notion that the party responsible for the incident would be consequential in fixing the problem was met with skepticism. Second, local officials unfamiliar with the NCP defaulted to what they believed their roles were during a disaster under the Stafford Act,⁴ which operates in a very different fashion.
• Speaking to the challenge of involving other government agencies and subject-matter experts in obtaining an independent source

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² According to Admiral Allen, “The fact that you assign a National Incident Commander (NIC) is not self-executing and does not automatically result in integration that you need…. I dealt directly with BP [British Petroleum] as a NIC, but everything else, because [of ] the way the response system was constructed, had to go through the FOSC [federal on-scene coordinator].”

³ Thad W. Allen, National Incident Commander’s Report: MC252 Deepwater Horizon, October 1, 2010.

⁴ Under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Act (42 U.S.C. 5121 et seq.), the federal government acts in a supporting role to local, state, tribal, territorial, and insular governments while respecting their sovereignty. A guiding principle of the National Response Framework is that when an incident reaches a scale in which all levels of government are involved, the response is “federally supported, state managed, and locally executed.” See U.S. Department of Homeland Security, National Response Framework, 4th ed., October 28, 2019.

of information, the Admiral underscored the need to incorporate the best available advice from the scientific community to solve problems. He cited the example of estimating the flow rate of oil coming out of the well and his creation of the Flow Rate Technical Group. The group’s work ultimately became the basis for the amount of discharge per day, which informed the civil and criminal penalties sought by the Department of Justice.

Admiral Allen cautioned OSR participants about leaning on government in the foreseeable future to solve remaining challenges. He “wouldn’t bank on any major piece of legislation that would enable us to do the things we did after OPA 90.” Instead, he described co-production as “the antidote” to complexity. To move forward, he noted the importance of cooperative engagement to identify and implement best practices and standards of care. Specifically, he highlighted the effectiveness of efforts such as OSR in bringing parties together in advance of an event to support more proactive steps to reduce risk in the absence of mandatory legislation or rulemaking.

In concluding his opening plenary, Admiral Allen pointed out that through the Gulf Research Program, a unique opportunity exists to turn a terrible incident into something that has long-term, sustainable, positive impact for the American public, the environment, and the communities along the Gulf.

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