my gf said the same thing today... she was like "why is our government not stepping up to the plate for these slow bitches at bp and then just sending them the bill once it's all done?"
i don't think it quite works like that... otherwise i'm sure we would have done it.
uh, BP is fronting the bill, are they not? Also, there's really no reason to want gov't or any other kind of task force try and solve this problem. The "experts" are within the industry.
A lot of the problem has to do with depending on decades-old technology and major lack of foresight when it comes to dealing with such disasters. There hasn't been much of an incentive in the industry to dump money into the kind of testing and development required to update these cleanup protocols, much less the unknown issues that have surrounded these deep sea projects. A lot of that is due to poor assumptions--the assumptions that there won't be a problem, that the numerous redundancies built into these machines will deal with any problem (of course, redundancies that are simply copies of a component with known flaws, are simply copies of flaws, with the same failure profile. so that doesn't really help.)
And how do you factor in problems that arise when two foreman from different companies are arguing over how to proceed on an imminent disaster, which seems to be the case?
As far as I understand it, though, the responsibility for this seems to fall as equally on Transocean as it does BP.