A year after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, oil has been dispersed and enhanced security, but the United States is not safe from another disaster, told AFP that the admiral had led the government's efforts against the oil spill.
"We can never prevent a disaster from taking place here," said retired Admiral Thad Allen, who has worked on various oil spills since the 80s and led relief operations after the explosion of the oil platform , April 20, 2010, off the coast of Louisiana.
The accident had caused the worst oil spill in U.S. history.BP, operator of the platform, could not prevent the spill of some 4.9 million barrels of crude in the Gulf of Mexico.
"And we're still cleaning," said Mr. Allen told AFP. "But the quantities are much smaller than those we have known, limited mostly to swampy areas," upsetting the nesting birds in the reeds still polluted the coast of the Southeast, according to Mr.Allen.
Over 1,700 km of wetlands and beaches of the Gulf have been polluted and more than 6,000 birds died, according to the American Council for the Defence of natural resources, while 2,000 people are still working to clean the first wetlands to be affected by oil spill.
The U.S. government said at the time a moratorium on offshore drilling and a few months later, the Department of the Interior has tightened rules against companies wanting to acquire a drilling permit.
"This is obviously an improvement over the previous situation, but we can never prevent such an event happen," he said.
Mr.Allen retired in June but stayed on the scene to carry out the plan of government support Obama until the wellbore BP is declared "dead" in September.
"It was clear that this crisis would not be resolved quickly," says Allen, urging the U.S. not to repeat the mistakes of the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez, which had spilled 50,000 tons of oil Wed
"Two to three years after the Exxon Valdez, it has invested heavily in research and development against these risks," according to Thad Allen.
"And while we focus on tanker accidents, the industry has changed and went to drill deeper and deeper."
"We should not let that happen.We should focus on innovation and technological improvements to track changes in the industry, "says Allen.
