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Spreading D.C.’s money around
Recent data on projects indicate Fenty doesn’t favor particular wards
by Nikita Stewart Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has
been good to Georgetown, where the city has spent $1 million a year on the Circulator bus service, $23 million to transform the neighborhood’s library after a fire and $30 million to upgrade the water-damaged Hardy Middle School. His administration also has in- vested in some of the poorer com- munities abutting the Anacostia River, pouring $55 million into the construction of four libraries in Ward 7 that feature WiFi and laptops and $116 million into school construction in Ward 8, in- cluding the $28 million Savoy El-
ementary School. In a city where the geographic lines of Rock Creek Park and the Anacostia River have historically defined racial and class divisions, some critics of Fenty (D) have long branded the mayor as favor- ing white neighborhoods at the expense of black communities. But a Washington Post analysis of city data on school construction, parks and recreation projects, and funding for new libraries and schools over the past three years shows that the reality is more complex.
And as the city’s population be- comes whiter and younger, the old geographic fault lines aren’t as telling as they once were. In ad- dition, some of the complaints about the mayor’s spending point to the lack of private development — like grocery stores and office- supply chains — that the city can
fenty continued on A8
Garish ‘poppy palaces’ lure affluent Afghans
by Karin Brulliard
kabul — For rent on Street 6 in the neighborhood of Sherpur: a four-story, 11-bedroom dwelling of pink granite and lime marble, complete with massage showers, a rooftop fountain and, in the basement, an Asian-themed nightclub. Price: $12,000 a month. It’s a relative bargain in this
district favored by former war- lords and bureaucrats — Kabul’s version of Beverly Hills. There’s a war on, but carnival-colored mansions are mushrooming alongside cratered streets and sewage streams. Vast outdoor chandeliers, heated indoor pools and acres of mirrored, skyscraper
glass windows abound. The grandiose houses, derided here as narco-tecture, have be- come the most obvious symbols of Afghanistan’s corruption, which ranks among the world’s worst and is fueled both by an enormous influx of U.S. dollars and by the opium trade. They have paralleled a building boom sweeping this and other Afghan cities, fed by the donor money that has helped distort an econo- my of haves and have-nots. But unlike the roads and schools being built, the “poppy palaces” are so garishly incongru- ous that some observers view them as more cultural erosion in an oft-invaded nation. Tradition-
houses continued on A16 GERALD HERBERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS P.J. Hahn lifts an oil-covered pelican that was stuck in oil at Queen Bess Island in Barataria Bay, La., just off the Gulf of Mexico. THE WHITE HOUSE
Struggling to gain control of the unknown
by Karen Tumulty and Juliet Eilperin
In a time of crisis, no resource is so precious, or so perishable, as credibility. Last weekend, the Obama White House discovered that it had sprung another leak. At a public briefing on May 29,
BP’s chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, described the company’s latest last-ditch maneuver to con- tain the Gulf of Mexico oil spill: hacking the gushing pipe at the bottom of the gulf, so that a cap could be installed over it. Twice, Suttles said that shearing the ris- er would have little effect on the size of the leak. White House officials could not
FOTO24/GALLO IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES
A local child blows a vuvuzela after playing soccer during the Festival Football event in the township of Alexandra in Johannesburg.
Come blow your horn South Africa welcomes the World Cup
in johannesburg, south africa
by Liz Clarke
f all the South African sights and sounds that will make the 2010 World Cup unique, none promises to rouse more controversy than the blare of a plastic horn. Roughly three feet long, the vuvuzela sounds like the ele- phant trunk it resembles when blown solo. But when blown en masse, as is custom wherever soccer is played in South Africa, it’s like a deafening swarm of lo- custs — louder than a rock con- world cup continued on A14
O
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cert, according to one study, but shy of the human threshold for pain. In the run-up to the World
Cup, several coaches and players called for its banning, saying the din made it impossible to com- municate on the pitch. Others claimed the vuvuzela posed a health hazard, stood to over- whelm TV broadcasts and was annoying, to boot. Why play the beautiful game,
detractors asked, amid such hor- rible noise?
But with the backing of FIFA President Sepp Blatter, who ar-
believe what they were hearing. The administration’s own analy- sis suggested the opposite, that cutting the riser could increase the flow of oil by 20 percent, at least temporarily. For weeks, federal officials had stood alongside BP executives at the briefings, reinforcing doubts about who was really in charge and putting the government in the position of vouching, by its mere presence, for BP’s veracity. No longer. The White House in- formed BP that it was putting an end to the joint appearances. The administration is now
scrambling to reclaim control, the appearance and the reality of it, over a situation that defies both. It has been a hasty and some-
what chaotic mobilization of a wide array of disparate govern- ment resources — including the Environmental Protection Agen- cy, the Federal Emergency Man- agement Agency, the Food and
politics continued on A10
To buy or sell? BP investors work to factor in the unfathomable. G1
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Payments to states
$170 million
Claims $40
million
CLEANUP COSTS PER DAY:
$14 million to $30 million
SOURCE: Credit Suisse analysis SO FAR:
$990 million
Printed using recycled fiber
DAILY CODE Details, C2
8183 Paying for it
The nearly $1 billion spent so far on oil spill cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico is just the beginning, according to a Credit Suisse analysis. Total costs could run in the tens of billions of dollars, with cleanup accounting for only half the bill. Economic damage to the fishing and tourism industries is projected to be steep. Under U.S. law, the costs of cleanup and damages are shared by the leaseholders: BP (65%), Anadarko Petroleum (25%) and Mitsui (10%).
By Karen Yourish and Laura Stanton
CLEANUP COSTS: (Through June 1)
$990 million That includes:
Cleanup $780 million
billion Range of
total cleanup costs
billion $11 $17
ESTIMATED EVENTUAL COST: UP TO
$31 billion
THE GULF
An ecosystem that is altered perhaps forever
by Joel Achenbach and David Brown
Potential liabilities for economic damages to fishing and
tourism industries
billion $14 Snorkeling along a coral reef
near Veracruz, Mexico, in 2002, Texas biologist Wes Tunnell spot- ted what looked like a ledge of rock covered in sand, shells, algae and hermit crabs. He knew, from years of research at the reef, that it probably wasn’t a rock at all. He stabbed it with his diving knife. His blade pulled up gunk. “Sure enough, it was tar from the Ixtoc spill,” Tunnell said. Twenty-three years earlier, in
1979, an oil well named Ixtoc I had a blowout in 150 feet of water in the southern Gulf of Mexico. The Mexican national oil com- pany Pemex tried to kill the well with drilling mud, and then with steel and lead balls dropped into the wellbore. It tried to contain the oil with a cap nicknamed The Sombrero. Finally, after 290 days, a relief well plugged the hole with cement and the spill came to an end — but only after polluting the gulf with 138 million gallons of crude. That remains the worst acci- dental oil spill in history — but the Deepwater Horizon blowout off the Louisiana coast is rapidly gaining on it. The spill has now been partial- ly contained with the cap that BP engineers lowered onto the mile- deep geyser Thursday night. That means roughly a quarter to half of the flow is being piped to a sur- face ship, the national incident commander, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said Saturday. BP hopes to improve the rate cap- tured in coming days. If official government estimates are cor-
impact continued on A10
Containment cap slows flow of oil gushing into Gulf of Mexico. A11
7
The Washington Post Year 133, No. 183
CONTENTS© 2010 SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010
THE spill’s long reach
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