Examiner.com | Contrary to early reports from the Obama Administration that it was not aware of the catastrophic nature of the Gulf oil spill, newly-released Coast Guard logs show that the government knew within hours that the spill would be devastating.

According to Public Integrity, the government almost immediately assessed that the gusher would emit at least 8000 barrels of oil into the Gulf per day.  By April 23 it had revised that estimate significantly upward.

(A lightly oiled Brown Pelican stands on a post near Cat Island off the coast of Louisiana Friday, June 4, 2010. The bird was impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)).

Over the first three days of the crisis — long before the public heard of a leak — the minimum estimate for a total well blowout ballooned eight-fold and the president was warned by his top aides that a major spill larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez might be coming, according to the documents and interviews.

This fact, plus the Coast Guard's original assessment of the looming threat, were curiously omitted from official White House briefings on the spill.

But that's not all.  On the very first day of the disaster the Coast Guard had informed the Obama Administration that the safety valve was not working and that underwater devices could not repair it:

Officials also learned within the first day of the disaster that the blowout preventer — an oil rig safety device that is supposed to cut off a well in case of an accident — was not functioning and could not be manually repaired by remote underwater robots.

“The second attempt of the ROV to shut-in the well has failed,” an entry at 11 a.m. CDT on April 21 read.

By April 23, the Coast Guard logs include a new estimate that a full blowout could result in a spill of 64,000 to 110,000 barrels per day, the logs show.

The leak estimates revealing an early awareness of a potential catastrophe are missing from the White House’s official timeline of the crisis.

Public Integrity goes further to provide a complete timeline of events, which vindicates what Obama critics have been saying all along, namely, that the Administration's failure to adequately address the looming disaster in a timely fashion is precisely what led to the growing devastation of the Gulf coastline.

This video also shows the timeline and Obama's abject failure in addressing the issue (H/t to ResistNet):

Further, Kitty Tobias in an expose published by Charging Elephant stated that she believes that the oil rig explosion was a clear act of sabotage.

In the piece entitled, 'You Want Logic and Truth about the BP Oil Disaster, Ask an Intelligent Woman,' Tobias says the following:

I own a small oil company (www.strategic-oil.com) and we specialize in on and off shore cleanup. My CFO wrote all the checks for the Valdez spill.

 I sat at an 1.5hr seminar by BP in 2008 at the OTC (offshore technology conference, the largest in the world) and witnessed first hand the technology aboard that ship particularly.

There is absolutely NO WAY possible for this to happen without it being sabotage. There were way too many tiers aboard that ship and it could have been stopped at any facet. And, even if ever man aboard was knocked out with toxic gases and the oil somehow managed to make it to water, their have huge blowup looking mats that surround the ship for miles to prevent (93%?) the oil from mixing in open waters.

It could be stopped now.   Cleanup easily within 72 hrs, and the oil salvageable and able to still be refined and produced IF they wanted to. I believe it’s intentional to drive up oil and gas prices and push cap & trade. It’s only speculation as to motives but, the events of this and my synopsis are based upon facts.

Late this afternoon Conservative Examiner learned that the credible information provided the sources cited above was provided to and accepted by U.S. Representative Darrell Issa of California, who is investigating the spill, and has been shared with the New York Times