Oil spill update from the field: Anarchy on the Louisiana coast as furious leaders defy BP and Coast Guard
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05/24/2010
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal used photos of oiled pelican eggs to express his outrage at the ineffective efforts of BP and the Coast Guard to stem the spill. (Photo by Kim Hubbard)
Venice, Louisiana, May 23
“We can fight this battle fifteen miles off our coasts,” belted Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, in a furious and desperate press conference held on the docks this afternoon in Venice, hub for the Deepwater response, “or we can be cleaning oil out of our fragile marshes for months or years.”
At his side, a young staff member held a poster board with pictures: an adult pelican doused in black oil, a colony of partially oiled pelicans, pelican eggs smeared with oil.
Jindal fired off a list of complaints with those handling the spill and energetically proposed solutions, continuously castigating BP, the Coast Guard and the Army Corp of Engineers. Communities have requested boom and none has come, or it has arrived after oil has already slicked their beaches, or boom has been available but boats intended to lay it have been idled by BP. Over the weekend in Grand Isle, a summery barrier island community that got doused with oil starting Friday, the mayor took matters into his own hands, commandeering a fleet of fishing vessels under BP contract to lay boom around sensitive marshes.
Jindal’s main focus was that the Army Corps of Engineers immediately approve the state’s effort to construct a series of offshore sand barriers to protect the Chandeleur Islands, Barataria Bay and Timbalier Bay. Within these areas are vast wildlife-rich marshes.
Following Jindal an agitated lineup of south Louisiana parish presidents took the mic.
“As you can see, our worst nightmare has come true,” said Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, a hefty man dressed in red. Nungesser insisted the barriers be erected immediately, without regards for future environmental concerns. He held high a crumpled printout of an oiled dolphin and mentioned a pair of sea turtles brought in the night before that were literally choking on oil.
“This is an absolute tragedy,” said Nungesser. “Where are the leaders in the Corps? In the Coast Guard? In BP? All we’ve heard from them is excuses. I am so disappointed in these agencies.”
Governor Jindal leaves the dockside press conference on a chopper. (Photo by Kim Hubbard)
Next was the mayor of Grand Isle, a bearded man with a thick drawl. “You listen to me good,” he warned leaders of parishes not yet affected by oil, “don’t wait for BP!”
Little was off limits for him. “Right now they have a dredge sitting off Grand Isle,” he said. “You don’t know how bad I want to go and take that thing as a pirate and start moving sand.”
The president of Saint Bernard Parish, a buff bald man whose domain lies east of New Orleans, spoke next. “The lesson learned by Katrina, Rita, and later, Gustav and Ike, is if we wait, we will die,” he said. “I don’t have a crystal ball, but if I were a betting man I’d bet the plan was to let us die, then come back and do $75 million worth of cleanup.”
“Either the Coast Guard has to side with its American citizens and protect its communities,” he continued, “or it has to side with a major world corporation named BP and betray American citizens.”
The tone was ratcheted down a bit by the slow-moving grandfatherly Saint Mary Parish president, who repeated five times: “BP, step up to the plate and be a man!”
A man on the verge of tears from the town of Jean Lafitte followed: “Other places around the world must be laughing at us because we have oil coming into our marshes and yet we must do an environmental study.”
When this blogger asked Jindal what his concerns were about moving forward with the sand barrier plan so quickly and why Jindal thinks the risks of oil outweigh those concerns, the governor pointed to the photo of the oil-smeared pelican eggs. “This is the danger of not acting,” he said. “We’re fighting a war here against this oil, and we’re going to do everything it takes to protect our coasts.”
Prayers Are With You!!
Seeing all that you are going through my prayers are with you LA !!! It will get us in FL sooner or later. Hang in there!!!!
Capping the oil well in the gulf
There is only one way we can stop the gush of oil in the gulf and all future accidents of this typel. We determine how we can plug the hole and push the plug down with a force greater than the force with which the oil is gushing out, and we must get a fluid-tight seal around it. The only force large enough to push down with this force, and it is free, and it surrounds the oil fountain! It is gravity aided by the weight of the water that around it!. The engineer who will cap this and future spills of this kind, must figure out how to balance the force of the oil gushing out using gravity, by harnessing the weight of the water in the ocean.Please get this message to those in charge before they resort to destructive methods such as blasting, as they may make the hole larger and the spill worse. The only way I can think of, for accomplishing this end is by inseting an "inverted Top-Hat," or an inverted "Wiches Cap" made of metal that is as heavy and as deep as we can make it, create an O-Ring with compressible material that will mould to the ocean floor and to the rim of the hole we have to seal, and lower it into the hole in the ground aand allow the ocen to get into in and do its job. Getting mad and blaming anyone is not going to help, it will only make matters worse. We must all join and think together coordinate all our resources and determine how to get the job on hand done.done. If you need the road map for engaging in coordinated thinking, go to my website or contact me. Best of luck!
A. Trivikram, MD.
Capping Off.....
Trivikram makes perfect since. USE a powered guided torpedo-shaped plug sized to fit tighly inside the well. If it's lined with various O-rings, this will help seal the leaks. Have they started drilling a relief valve?? This would definitely take the pressure off.
Oil Spill
What can citizens do about this NOW? We can't wait. The gulf will become our dead sea if we do. This is a crime pure and simple. Surely there are minds out there that are intelligent enough to figure out a way to keep the oil from the shore...what can we do?
Save yourselves; this is war
Don't wait for approval; we are not children. Protect the beaches NOW
Jindal's false sanctimony
So Jindal's plan is to choke off the marshes with permanent berms to prevent oil from getting to them, essentially to kill the marshes to save the marshes. Seems like there's a baby and bathwater analogy there.
That said, the parish presidents have every single right to be angry at the embarrassing, impotent spectacle that has been the Department of Interior's response to this and their bizarre acquiescence to BP at every single turn.
look what your greedy oil
look what your greedy oil corporations have done!!! I hope you are all happy up there in fat ass, buffet eating corporate america! nice job on destroying the worlds sensative marine ecosystem!! you idiots have no idea what you have done! my heart goes out to the marine and wildlife that is affected by this. the full scale damage is nowhere near being realized because this well could spew for months! all because you jackasses didnt have any emergency plans in place in case of a disaster like this you just carelessly drilled.
nice job BP ...may your conmpany and others with your morals and ethics quickly go bankrupt and never be allowed to harm the planet again
Everyone needs to realize
Everyone needs to realize that this is only another piece to the puzzle and that in two years everything is going to be destroyed!
where are the skimmers?
Where are the skimmers? When the oil is known to be approaching a shoreline, I would expect to see an army of skimmers offshore defending our coastline.
Booms can only catch so much oil before they are overwhelmed - the skimmers need to be there to suck up what they catch or they do no good.
WHERE ARE THE SKIMMERS?
Come on guys!
What riles me the most is that everything that BP has done to date has been in an attempt to salvage their precious oil. What they should have done from the start is try to stop the leak 100%. None of this "let's try to collect 10 - 20% of what's leaking until we can come up with a way to collect 40-50%". They should have tried this "top-kill" solution back in April! If that didn't work then try the junk-shot. If that doesn't work then try to start collecting. BP said that the volume of oil actually spilling wouldn't change their current response. I promiss you that if they would have saying from the start that it was really 2 million barrels a day spilling then they would have been told to forgo any solution that didn't involve a 100% stopage of this oil spill.
amen!
Exactly!!
How dare they on top of killing humans, sea life for generations, endangered species during nesting season, livelilhood and property of folks just recovering from the floods - put their dirty oil recovery before cleaning up and stopping their own horrible disaster now shown to be caused from purposeful neglect of required safety measures!!
They could have cemented this off long ago but instead their motive is still just oil and profit. They're disgusting and deceitful. We need to stop just listening to and accepting their lies and get objective experts in there to stop this thing.
Were is this administration,
Were is this administration, we were all over Bush Administration for Kitrina,
What are we afraid of?
Does anyone on this site
Does anyone on this site drive a car?
spare me
Of course we do, Anonymous. Not all of us can bike to work. Not all of us have access to reliable mass transit. Not all of us live in walkable communities. But many of us do what small individual bit we can to limit our driving and be responsible.
If you're going to castigate people simply for driving then you need to put your money where your mouth is and advocate for opportunities in your own community to make our lives less dependent on fossil fuels.
The problem is systemic, and has to be tackled on a huge scale. It requires massive government involvement and a motivated populace. And I have to tell you, smug anonymous comments on message boards aren't particularly motivating.
I totally agree with you
I totally agree with you Nate. Individuals do not have the power or resources to provide environmentally clean transportation alternatives. The problem is that oil companies control our government, so alternative fuels and vehicles won't be developed as long as the big oil companies are in control. There are no easy answers. I'd be happy to take mass transit or ride a bicycle if our road system was set up to work that way. Interstate highways are proof that our government wants us to continue driving CARS. Unless, as you said a new infrastructure that supports mass transit or alternative fuel vehicles is built, we're all pretty much at their mercy.
At the oil companies mercy.
At the oil companies mercy. Well too bad for the hundreds of thousands of birds, turtles, dolphins, fish, crustaceans !!!!! Well too bad you guys will not be able to enjoy Louisiana, or Florida beaches for possibly years. Cost of doing business I guess for corporate America. Fuck the environment as long as you can keep driving the cars. Too bad your government along with most oil producing nations governments,( Canada ) are puppets of the big business (especially oil) yeah we need oil, for now, but BP,other oil companies and the US government could have ensured that safety features existed and could be put into place if this happened. Don,t drill in deepwater if you can`t plan for all contingencies!!!!!!! Its only common sense!!!! something that is non existant in this case......now everyone is standing around with their heads up their asses going, `` hmmmmm what do we do now `` JUST IMAGINE WHAT THE GULF WILL LOOK LIKE IF THIS WELL CAN`T BE PLUGGED FOR 2 OR MORE MONTHS WHILE THEY DRILL A RELIEF WELL
in the meantime you can take a relaxing drive away from the gulf coast in your car!!
We're not at the mercy of
We're not at the mercy of the oil companies, but are at the mercy of our own government. Can you stop the oil spill Trent? Do you drive a car or take oil run mass transit? Do you use electricity? The founding fathers of this country worried about the federal government having too much power. But that's exactly what we have now. We fought the Revolutionary War to rid ourselves of tyrants, but now have "democratic" tyrants in Washington. I'm not saying I have the answer either. I'm just saying that everyone in this country uses oil based energy in some way or another. To get away from that the whole "system" has to be changed. How do we realistically do that? I have no idea. I live in Louisiana and was born here. Although I do not live on the coast, this is my home. You have no idea how helpless the Obama administration and BP have made us feel. People died in the explosion, not to mention the devastation wildlife and our fisheries. I am very much concerned about the animals and our environment. You really didn't understand a word I said.
BP and that stands for BRITISH PETROLEUM>
I have been going to Destin Florida since I was 5 years old with my family and friends. I now take my own family each yearlike my mother and father did all those years. This is the 6th year my wife and i have taken our 3 children since my oldest child is 6. I am scheduled to go July 22 through Aug. !st. These are the whitest beaches in the world and now they face a strong chance of being completely covered in oil. I see all of my fellow US vacationers making statements like "What do we do about our reservations?" or" I guess I should cancel and go somewhere else?" I would be ashamed and what is happening to this country? It is being eaten up by large companies like BP and we need to take every piece of asset that company and it's little "Smartass" CEO own til their British Assets are $0.00> I would love to have about 10 minutes in any ring with that little worm. His calm collected attitude showed exactly how much he cares!!! I have extended my stay in Destin , Fl for my family this year from 7 days to 10 days. Not canceled or asked for a refund!! Why?? My family and I have decided that we are going to volenteer our time and spend our vacation budget to help clean up!! Or for now I will say possible clean up!! AMERICA this is a disaster to the whitest beaches in the world> If I have to, I will pull my 29' deck boat to Fl. load it with large heavy plastic containers. I will take 1 or 2 of my best men who work for me and let my wife and kids help on the beaches or at dolphin Island. Speaking of Dolphin Island that was a beautiful wildlife paridise and where me and my wife were married. RUINED>>>. Guys get your own plan together and dont stand there and listen to one of the DUMBASS BP contractors trying to run you off> I would have %^$%^ &^&^^& the hell out of the man who told the NBC reporters to stay away. Lets help the place we love not leave it to be ruined. All the people in Florida and LA gulf coasts>> i live in Arkansas but I am in it with you and I will be there "god Willing" to help defend the animals and clean up or what ever is needed done> I will see you soon and GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!!!!!!
open your eyes america
phil is right we are going to destin the 15 th of June and I am going to give the time i have this year to the place i love to vacation!! my wife is 100% in but we have to pull together and win this war. Get off your ass BP and take care of your mess>
God bless