first spoke to Rick Steiner more than three months ago -- about two weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster -- after a source recommended I talk to him for a story I was writing about the spill as a teachable moment. Steiner is a marine conservationist and activist in Alaska who started studying oil spills when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, and never stopped.
What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing -- and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true.
"Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response," he told me at the time. "There's no such thing as an effective response. There's never been an effective response -- ever -- where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water.
"Most of the oil that goes into the water in a major spill stays there," he said. "And once the oil is in the water, the damage is done."
Steiner was also one of the first scientists to warn that much if not most of BP's oil was remaining underwater, forming giant and potentially deadly toxic plumes.
I thought of Steiner last week, as I sat in a congressional hearing room listening to Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey question Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Lehr was one of the authors of an increasingly controversial federal report about the fate of BP's spilled oil that Obama administration officials misleadingly cited as evidence that the "vast majority" of the oil was essentially gone.