I've had it up to here with your rules!

We're rolling near to Day 100 of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and while the leak may have stopped, we continue to find out more and more bad news about how the whole thing was handled. First was the revelation that BP had Photoshopped several photos designed to show what a good job they were doing handling the spill. But the US government has also not done all it can. From the Financial Post:

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

Unbelievably, the US turned down the offer. Why? Because the ships don't remove enough oil from the water.

The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.

When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. As U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the clean-up operation, explained in a press briefing on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that." In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls "crazy."

This is typical of how things seem to work down here, when well-intentioned rules seem to go awry. Worse, nobody ever has the authority, or the courage, to take the side of reason and throw regulation to the wind. Didn't Star Trek teach us that even the Prime Directive could be violated if the circumstances called for it?