hypocritexposer
Well-known member
Friday, 02 July 2010 5:20PM
Louisiana guardsmen to track deployment of oil skimmers
Associated Press Reporting
Louisiana National Guard troops will monitor and report the dispatching of skimmers to deal with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill off the state's coast, Gov. Bobby Jindal said Friday.
Expressing frustration with a lack of information from the U.S. Coast Guard on how many skimmers are working at a given time, Jindal said a contingent of about 20 troops will assemble data daily and report to the state.
Jindal and coastal leaders have been complaining about long periods when it has appeared not all available skimmers were working to clean up oil - and a lack of up-to-date information from the Coast Guard. The governor said the move would "hold them accountable for the number of skimmers at work."
"We can't afford to have skimmers not at work when we have oil off our coast and entering our wetlands," Jindal said.
A spokesman for the governor said troops will be assigned to each parish and also be aboard some vessels to assemble the data.
Ret. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man for the oil-spill response, later said Jindal "is entitled to his opinions and he represents this state very well."
"My constituency is the entire Gulf Coast," Allen said. "I am the national incident commander."
It's the second time the National Guard has been brought in to keep an eye on the Coast Guard. Earlier, the state had troops monitoring placement of protective boom.
Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, which has sustained some of the heaviest damage from the spill, said coastal officials were asking BP PLC to buy 300 additional skimmers that can be mounted on existing boats. He said the plan would call for the delivery of up to 10 skimmers a week.
Nungesser also said parish officials were having trouble getting enough equipment to deal with the spill.
"We should be physically deploying all the equipment available around the world," Nungesser said.
The governor, who took a helicopter tour of Redfish Bay along the coast, said Hurricane Alex had broken many strands of booms and washed others onto shore. Jindal said that was proof that "we cannot rely on boom as our first line of defense."
http://www.wwl.com/Louisiana-guardsmen-to-track-deployment-of-oil-ski/7606809