As Jindal Criticized Federal Bureaucracy, Louisiana Guard Troops Sat Idle, page 1

I have finally in my mind come to the conclusion that the patient has died, despite the best efforts to save it. The best efforts can only now be in scooping up oil off beaches, as there were no best efforts available anywhere on the planet at the moment the physical disaster started.

It started when greed mixed with risk taking and no common sense or ethics were added:

One area has seen the billions of dollars made by the supmajors invested in new technology to drill deeper and extract oil in harder to reach places, but not in mitigating the risk of a potential catastrophic failure. Hundreds of millions of dollars more have gone toward upgrading old technology: GPS, geology mapping software, sensors, wireless connectivity. Nothing, however, was spent to improve the “tools” used to cleanup oil spills, which were used in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico in 1979.

Then the mixture is nurtured like some toxins in a petridish:

Wall Street on the Gulf

The entire inept response to this crisis parallels Wall Street’s broken risk management system, with out-to-lunch government oversight that led to the bursting of the superinflated housing bubble of 2008. Like the investment banks, BP’s business model has been based on greed for profits, conducting operations as cheaply—not safely—as possible, with lax regulation that has been so contaminated by lobbyists that they couldn’t police their own industry, with no internal risk management controls in place.

From the same source

Then when the worst happens in the worst place possible, nothing truly can be done to mitigate the effects. This is not some movie scifi experiment gone wrong; this is real life and real destruction and real death:

First, it had to possess the ability to skim oil in a wide range of viscosities. Second, it had to do so without its pump being clogged. Third, it had to do it in high capacity in rough seas. The calm of the laboratory wouldn’t work in the oceans of the world.

The problem with today’s technology for cleaning an oil spill is that they don’t meet any one of those three critical criteria. ...And the wide range of viscosities has proved problematic for collecting oil, as BP and the U.S. government are now learning.
....
I asked the Euroskimmer inventor what is wrong with today’s oil recovery technology. He said that the Coast Guard’s skimmers are in fact nothing more than cutters towing “booms” and “sleds” with weirs that corral the floating spill at the slower-than-walking speed of 0.75 knots. Once oil is corraled, pumps are inserted to begin the separating process.

“Such old tools can’t possibly keep up with the magnitude of the Gulf blowout or the spreading of a giant oil spill,” he said.

And not when the source of the oil hasn’t been capped yet.

If the gulf states learned anything about how to rebuild their lives after Katrina, they'd better start right now in rebuilding. The difference this time is that there will be no past left over to build on. The part of the planet they came to depend on to live has been changed for the foreseeable future.

Those that made their livelihood from non-polluted water and beaches need to be helped to move on to something else. What that something else will be needs to be figured out, and quickly.

Let there be an investigation and the remedy found so this never happens again, anywhere on this planet. Keep the heat on these corporations, turned up every bit as high to cook them, as once cooked the seafood that no longer exists!

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The stages of dying. Pointing fingers, praying for miracles is over. We can choose to sit in the chair of depression awhile, but better is to accept what is and move on to the next life.

Keep the heat on, but help these good people of the gulf to make a new life. What ideas are out there now to help them recover? To help them see a future?

How will their fellow state citizens, the ones not on the gulf help them? Can these residents be employed in a new industry, one that deals with the need for new cleanup tech worlwide? Green technology?