Taking coastal matters into our own hands

Registered fishermen still waiting by the phone for BP
June 22, 2010
Helen LeBoeuf
June 24, 2010
Registered fishermen still waiting by the phone for BP
June 22, 2010
Helen LeBoeuf
June 24, 2010

We are fighting a war. There is no doubt that the ongoing BP oil spill is a full-frontal assault on our Louisiana way of life.


From the beginning of this disaster more than 60 days ago, there have been many sorrowful sights of devastation in our wetlands and our wildlife habitats, but there have also been true heroes emerging in the battles to protect our coast.

In the first weeks of the spill, we asked BP and the Coast Guard for their detailed plan for responding to an oil spill of this magnitude. They told us they would get us their plans, but when a detailed plan was never given to us, we took matters into our own hands and worked with our coastal leaders, fishermen and first responders to dig down and create our own detailed coastal parish response plans.


These detailed plans outlined specific booming locations and booming amounts needed in every coastal parish all across our state, the use of jack-up barges to deploy boom quickly as oil moves, as well as training sites where the Coast Guard could train the fishermen who could no longer fish.


As the oil started to come ashore and boom was late arriving in many areas, we again appealed to BP and the Coast Guard to meet the requests for resources outlined in our detailed parish plans.

We were again told to wait while they found more boom. Again, we did not wait. We moved ahead on our own, mobilizing the Louisiana National Guard to begin filling dozens of gaps in barrier islands along our coast. They dropped sand bags from Blackhawk helicopters, pushed in sand with dump trucks on the ground and set up Hesco baskets and Tiger Dam structures to wall off the interior marsh lands from the repeated waves of oil surging onto our coast.


Wind and weather conditions moved the oil into our coast again and again. We knew this oil spill was not going to be a single event for Louisiana; it is a war that we will need to fight on many fronts. We knew there was a limited supply of hard plastic boom, so we consulted with dredging professionals and coastal leaders to create a plan to fortify many of our barrier islands – from the Chandeluers to the Isle Dernieres – so we could build up a wall of sand to fight oil 15 to 20 miles off of our coast, before it ever gets into our sensitive wetlands.


Instead of the limited plastic booms, the fortification of these barrier islands would act as a functioning “sand boom” to stop the oil.

We proposed 24 segments of sand booms to fortify against the oil. We stressed the importance of this plan day after day, while the Army Corps of Engineers promised us a quick review. While the Corps’s review process drug on, we took matters into our own hands and redirected our state-operated dredger on East Grand Terre to begin creating a sand boom wall of protection on that island.


Only days after we directed this work, oil hit that area and today the sand boom on East Grand Terre is actively holding oil back from entering interior wetlands and waterways.

After weeks of delay, the Corps finally approved six segments in our plan, but the Coast Guard announced that they would only call on BP to pay for one segment. We wouldn’t take no for an answer.

We got together again with coastal parish leaders and met with the president and National Incident Commander Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen.

We called on them to force BP to fund all six segments already approved by the Corps and 24 hours later, the Coast Guard finally called on BP to pay for all six approved sand booming segments in our plan. With the Coast Guard’s call for BP to fund the construction of these six sand boom segments, BP threatened to stall our progress again by wasting time talking about contract issues.

We told BP to stop sending us lawyers and lobbyists; they had two choices – to either begin work on the segments or get out of the way and let us begin the dredging work ourselves.

We chose option two for them and signed an emergency contract to begin work on the sand boom segments ourselves – again taking matters into our own hands to protect our coast.

On Monday, June 7th, I took BP’s managing director in charge of all Gulf Coast recovery, Bob Dudley, out to see the devastation of the oil firsthand. After seeing the oil all over East Grand Terre and how effective the state’s sand booming efforts were at keeping that oil out of our wetlands, Mr. Dudley came with me to Grand Isle to announce that the company was immediately advancing the state $60 million to begin sand boom work and they were committed to fully paying the estimated $360 million cost to construct the first six segments of sand boom in our plan.

The war against this oil spill continues today and our commitment to winning this war has only grown stronger. The battles have been tough and the damage is already great, but the heart of our heroes, the resilience of our people, and the dedication of our National Guard troops and first responders will absolutely lead us to a victory in protecting our Louisiana Way of Life.

We will not wait on bureaucracy or wishful thinking. We will continue to move forward on our own to implement our own ideas for protecting coastal Louisiana even when BP and the Coast Guard don’t agree with our plans. I know we can do this because of the many heroes we have fighting in this war alongside us – our coastal parish presidents, our National Guard troops, the fishermen who are laying out boom and the communities that are banding together to help one another in their time of need.

We will protect our people and our communities and our industries that make Louisiana the greatest state in the world, and we will not rest until every drop of oil is off of our coast and out of our marshes and our water – and our seafood and our coastline are 100 percent whole again.