fishermen who are watching us right now who are not can t even figure out how they re going to make it over the next month. we have got to do everything we can. this is our watch, and so, yes, i think the liability is unlimited. and i think b.p. needs to be prepared to pay and to pay up to the nth degree. whatever it takes to clean the mess. you head the subcommittee for the coast guard. we re not hearing much about the coast guard. what are they doing? how are they doing? are they doing everything they can do? they re doing absolutely everything they can do. from the very beginning, on the 20th of april, they were on the spot. of course, if you ll remember early on they were in a rescue mode trying to rescue the 11 folks who sad lly parished. then they were surveying the scene constantly and around the 24th i think it was they began to first notice the leaks and then later they discovered even
in wall to wall tonight, an update on the effort to cap that tragic oil spill in the gulf of mexico. we want to show you this structure right here. it looks a little awkward, but it left port today. it s a giant dome, a cap they want to use to plug the biggest leak underground. they capped the small one today. let s show you how this is supposed to work. here it is right here. it will be brought out on a crane. the idea is to lower it down over where the oil is gushing out. if it is successful, the oil would be taken in a tube to a tanker ship. that is a plan. still questions about the engineering of this would work. let s walk over to the magic wall. a big political debate about the pace of the disaster response, whether bp has been forth coming, let s go back and look at the key days. it was on the 20th of april that the oil rig exploded. search and rescue was the top priority in those first days.
again, could be but it could be an economic and environmental disaster. you pressed pretty hard about the timeline and the reaction of the federal government to this disaster. yeah, look, i m of mixed minds on it myself. but the fact is that the explosion took place on the 20th of april. they thought for several days that there was no leak and then they thought it was a thousand barrels a day. it wasn t until the 28th that they decided bp that it was 5,000-barrels a day, that is five times as much as they said. and it wasn t until the 29th that the president made his first public statement. really ginned it up and got the defense department involved. their argument is we were reacting to the facts as we best understood them at the time. i m curious about the whole relation shell with bp. according to the law, the oil company involved in the spill is primarily responsible, totally responsible for the cost, totally responsible for operating it but the federal government can step in a
the government took a look and said it s 5,000. is too much faith or trust being put in the oil companies to assess incidents like this? i believe that it has to be a combined effort by the industry, specialists as well as the government specialists. as we move through our understanding of what we were dealing with, 5,000 feet bhoe the surface, it has been continually refined as we got more information and assess that information and as we combine that assessment with what we re seeing on surface. it has been a very difficult and complex effort to precisely state what the release has been. but we continue to bring every asset to bear just as we have been doing since this started on the 20th of april. we continue to bring assets to fight this oil. rear admiral sally brice, thanks for joining us.
leader. republicans don t have anybody like that right now. is that the speakers all? we ve heard a lot of people claim speaker ryan that he simply wasn t able to keep his people in line and bring them to the table. is table. isn t his fault he doesn t have somebody he can twist arms in the way way they need to? at the combination of that. this was john boehner, the first major thing paul ryan said they would do was reform repeal and replace obamacare and they failed. this is one of the reasons why people said maybe paul ryan shouldn t take this job because eventually you are going to get to this point. this is beyond cleaning out the barn a year and a half over john on her left and they have to do with the debt ceiling, keeping government open. i would caution people are talking about tax reform, funding for the federal government runs that on the 20th of april. that is a big, big deal. they didn t have to deal with repeal and replace obamacare. that is a political issue