“We’ve got to do something, man! It’s just criminal,” said Billy Nungesser. The president of Plaquemines Parish was visibly upset after a local wildlife officer showed him two sea turtles covered in oil and clinging to life.
Nungesser has proposed an ambitious plan utilizing the U.S. dredge fleet to build an 80 mile “sand boom” along coastal Louisiana’s barrier island chains to protect against the BP oil spill. But the parish leader is growing impatient with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has yet to issue a permit to carry out his plan.
“We prepare for the worst for hurricanes and hope for the best,” Nungesser said. “Damn it! We’re not preparing for the worst. We’re sitting here hoping something doesn’t happen that we see happening in front of our eyes and we aren’t doing a damn thing about it.”
Oil has already breached some of the traditional barriers that were installed to protect beaches and wetlands in this ecologically fragile area.
“We’re putting boom out that washes ashore every day,” Nungesser said. “What are we gonna do — just keep doing this until everything’s dead?”
Frustration over the oil spill is being felt from Louisiana’s wetlands to the White House.
Two top Obama administration officials claim BP has “fallen short” on its pledge to keep the American public and government informed about the spill.
In a letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson write, “The public and the United States Government are entitled to nothing less than complete transparency in this matter.”
The letter requests all records of sampling, monitoring and internal investigations — as well as any videos related to the spill.
Under pressure from federal lawmakers, BP has made public a video feed from the ocean floor that shows the spill site in real time. The live images have led independent researchers to conclude the oil spill is much larger than originally thought.
BP officials say an insertion tube is capturing oil from the leaking well at a rate of 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) per day — a figure equivalent to original estimates of the spill. However, the live video feed shows additional quantities of oil still billowing into the Gulf.
“BP’s numbers just don’t add up, and the video proved it,” Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass) said in a press release. “The whole world could see that there must be much more than 5,000 barrels per day coming from BP’s spill. That is just what we saw today, who knows what we will see tomorrow?”
In an interview with FOX News Radio reporter Eben Brown, BP spokesman Mark Salt insisted the original 5,000 barrel per day estimate of the total spill came from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and not his company. However, the new revelations of additional oil have prompted BP’s critics to suggest the company has been less than forthcoming with bad news.
Neither the oil company nor federal officials would speculate on a new estimate of how much oil has spilled into the Gulf.
BP has been trying to mitigate the effects of the oil spill using record amounts of dispersants — chemicals that break the oil into small droplets. The company has already deployed approximately 655 thousand gallons of dispersant (600 thousand gallons on the surface and 55 thousand gallons underwater).
Chemical dispersants carry risks, but are generally less toxic than the oil they break up. Nevertheless, federal regulators have raised concerns about the potential impact the large quantities of chemicals could have on the environment. The EPA has issued a directive instructing BP to seek a less toxic dispersant than the one currently in use.
On Sunday, BP plans to begin efforts to plug the rest of the leaking well 5,000 feet below the surface by filling the site with heavy mud and encasing it in concrete. The so-called “top kill” method has never been attempted at such a great depth.
But as with the Plaquemines Parish president’s plan to build an artificial barrier island, extraordinary measures may be required to control a catastrophic oil spill.