Oops is now a Coastie term

Campbell Robertson and John Rudolf have an article in The New York Times about the Gulf spill:

An internal review of the Coast Guard’s performance during the BP oil spill cleanup last year has concluded that the agency was caught badly unprepared and that the response operation was dogged from the beginning by significant planning failures. The report, which was commissioned by the Coast Guard, found that the agency’s preparedness for environmental crises had “atrophied over the past decade” as the guard confronted its expanded security responsibilities in the post-9/11 world. This resulted in significant coordination and communication problems during the spill response as well as a lack of familiarity with long-established procedures among many of the response workers.
The review, completed in January, was quietly made public by the Coast Guard last month. It was prepared by a team of experts that included two retired Coast Guard admirals, as well as officials from several federal and state agencies, with substantial involvement from representatives from the oil industry, the spill response industry, and the environmental community.
The Coast Guard has prepared these reports, called incident specific preparedness reviews, to identify areas for improvement after major operations. The report found that both the government and private sector “demonstrated a serious deficiency in planning and preparedness for an uncontrolled release of oil from an offshore drilling operation”.
Despite the Gulf of Mexico’s dense concentration of offshore drilling rigs, responsible for about thirty percent of the country’s domestic oil production, the panel found evidence that Coast Guard personnel in the region had “not reviewed or commented” on any industry-created oil spill response plan in the recent past. Many of the Coast Guard staff members interviewed by the panel “acknowledged that they were unfamiliar” with these plans, “even though they held prominent positions” in the command structure for the response to the BP oil spill, the report states.
While the response plan by BP, the well’s operator, was criticized as unrealistic in the report, the government’s plans were also found to be inadequate and incomplete.
The failure to master and monitor the planning process led to a lack of coordination between the unified command, which managed the response operation, and state and local officials, who in some cases pursued separate response plans that were at odds with the overall operation. The report makes clear that the absence of local and state officials from the prespill planning process led to high-profile disagreements and some ill-advised response strategies during the spill.
“We clearly point out that the contingency planning was not adequate, certainly not for a spill of this size,” said Roger Rufe, a retired Coast Guard vice admiral and chairman of the team that produced the review. “There was a complacency that this was not going to happen at this scale.”
Captain Ron LaBrec, a Coast Guard spokesman, said the Coast Guard was reviewing the recommendations and had already begun making improvements. (The Department of Homeland Security has requested an additional $11.5 million in its 2012 budget to help bolster the Coast Guard’s ability to respond to major spills, a department official said.) Captain LaBrec also emphasized that this spill response operation was the largest in history. “Led by the Coast Guard, a force of 47,000 responders from federal, state, local agencies, private industry, and NGOs was organized rapidly,” he said in an email, using the abbreviation for nongovernmental organizations. “The Coast Guard is proud of the efforts of these responders in and out of government who defended the Gulf Coast from the oil, and of course this unprecedented response required coordination among government agencies at all levels,” he said.
Admiral Rufe acknowledged that the magnitude of the spill (at an estimated five million barrels, it was the worst offshore oil spill in United States history) presented an exceptional array of challenges, including relentless political pressure from parish officials to President Obama, and a nonstop news cycle that “overwhelmed the ability of the response structure to stay ahead of the information curve.”
But some of those problems were caused by a dearth of properly trained personnel and the need to improve in areas that should have already been meticulously set out in existing plans, the report suggested. Investigators found that federal agencies had pursued a “dysfunctional” communications strategy during the spill, with administration officials overturning existing protocols and exerting final authority over all public communications related to the spill response. The panel found that this strategy delayed the distribution of information, causing confusion and frustration among news media outlets and the public.
Adam Fetcher, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, challenged this assertion. With such a huge demand for information from federal agencies in both Washington and the gulf region, he said, “it was imperative given all the moving pieces that information remain consistent.”
But the problems in coordination also hampered the effectiveness of the response itself. For example, the lack of up-to-date contingency plans all along the Gulf meant that there were often significant gaps in identifying the coast’s most environmentally delicate areas. Had these areas “been given appropriate attention during the planning process,” the report reads, “the adverse impacts could have been much less.”
The report suggests that the command structure itself worked, finding little evidence for dissension or inappropriate collusion between the Coast Guard and BP. Yet so many people were unfamiliar with this command structure, a problem that could have been prevented by adequate funds and preparation, that the structure itself did not assure an adequate response.
“Properly done,” Admiral Rufe said, “it would have been much better executed.”

Rico says the admiral puts it well, if stupidly: if it had been better executed, it would have had to have been properly done... But isn't it a bad sign that a 'spill response industry' even needs to exist?