Louisiana needs feds in it to win it

For 80-plus days now, oil from the BP oil spill has struck our shores. It is killing our marshes, injuring hundreds of birds, and destroying our world-renowned fishing habitats and oyster beds. Worse, thousands of our people are struggling to provide for their families and are worried if they will ever be able to return to the careers they love – and for many, the only career they have ever known.

There is no doubt to anyone on the ground here that we are fundamentally in a war against this oil spill. It is invading our land, hurting our people, crippling our economy and threatening our state’s future.

Just like we would fight any war, we have worked with our leaders on the ground to stay on offense.

We are deploying every resource and strategy we have against this oil – often in the absence of any other plan from BP or federal officials.

In the first weeks of the spill, for example, we were promised a detailed boom plan from BP and the Coast Guard. When that detailed plan never came, we developed our own coastal protection plans – including resources to respond to a worst-case scenario spill; first, second, and third lines of defense, plans to train workers and even suggested training locations.

When boom did begin to arrive, it was too little and too late in many areas, so we proposed a 24-segment sand berm plan to protect our shoreline by using the natural framework of our barrier islands to help block and trap oil for collection before it gets into our marshes.

Even after we demonstrated the effectiveness of sand berms, it took us weeks to convince the Coast Guard to approve even six segments from this plan, and then longer for us to force BP to fund the work.

We then created a “vacuum barge” system because we were tired of seeing oil sit in our marshes, killing the vegetation there, while the Coast Guard told us they didn’t have skimmers small enough to clean it out.

At first, the Coast Guard told us they were unsure of the idea, but we convinced them to let us create a prototype so we could show them how well it works.

The first vacuum barge was successful and then we fought to scale up those operations. Only about a week later, the Coast Guard shut down all our vacuum barge operations from removing oil off of our coast because they said the barges had not been properly inspected for life jackets and fire extinguishers. No kidding. A day later, the Coast Guard came back and said that they decided the barges didn’t need to be inspected after all.

In what has now become a pattern, the U.S. Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife shut down our dredging operations on the northern Chandeleurs Islands recently where we had already created 4,000 feet of land to protect our interior wetlands from oil impact, and indeed it has already worked to stop oil. A U.S. Department of Interior official said they were worried that our dredging operations would hurt a bird habitat nearby. The only problem with that is we were dredging in a permitted area in open water and there isn’t a place for a bird to land for a mile. Most recently, the U.S. Corps of Engineers just denied a rock permit for Grand Isle to help protect the passes from oil entering Barataria Bay. Apparently some bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., think temporary rocks in the water pose more of a threat than oil in the water. What’s more frustrating is that this denial came nearly a month after we joined with the mayor and local officials to talk to the president about this permit and after weeks of negotiating with the corps on what conditions in the plan would be acceptable to them.

Too often in this disaster we have spent precious time battling red tape, bureaucracy, and just a plain lack of common sense from the federal government and BP. In Louisiana, we learned from hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike that disasters demand outside-the-box thinking and quick action. We also learned not to wait on the federal government and to take matters into our own hands when it comes to protecting our people and our land. We are in a war and we need the federal government to lead, follow or get out of the way.

As of today, we need more skimmers to remove oil from the water, more boom to protect our shores, and improved surveillance of oil so it can be removed from the water before it destroys more of our interior wetlands. Most importantly, we need the federal government to pay attention to strategies for combating this spill from those of us on the frontlines, and to take action on them with the urgency this fight demands. If the federal government agrees this is a war, we need to see that they are in it to win it.

Our prayers continue to be with those on the coast and every Louisianian who is impacted by this spill. I am constantly amazed by the perseverance of our people in responding to this disaster. They are on the front lines every day – turning fishing boats into defense ships, dragging boom to stop oil – and always coming up with more ideas to protect our land and waters. It is the same spirit of perseverance that strengthened us through hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike; and this same perseverance leaves no doubt in my mind that we will win this war against the oil spill and come back better than ever before. To the people of coastal Louisiana, we will stand with you and work alongside you until every drop of oil is off of our coast and out of our waters and all of our fisheries and our industries are 100 percent restored.