Louisiana Wants U.S. Help, and Its Own Way

Louisiana Wants U.S. Help, and Its Own Way
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: June 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26jindal.html?th&emc=th


NEW ORLEANS — For weeks, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has attacked BP and the Coast Guard for not having adequate plans and resources to battle the oil spill.

But interviews with more than two dozen state and federal officials and experts suggest that Louisiana, from the earliest days of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has often disregarded its own plans and experts in favor of large-scale proposals that many say would probably have had limited effectiveness and could have even hampered the response.

The state’s approach has also at times appeared divided: while some state officials work alongside the Coast Guard and BP every day, others, including the governor, have championed a go-it-alone approach.

Such a stance is popular in a place justifiably skeptical of federal disaster response after Hurricane Katrina. The federal response, at times slow and disorganized, has been a matter of grave concern to this state, with its fragile and complicated coastline.

Mr. Jindal, a Republican like all but one of the other gulf state governors, has been alone among them for his publicly critical stance toward the federal agencies in the response.

But experts said such antagonism could actually slow down that response.

“You can ask for the moon and say you didn’t get it, but I don’t think that’s going to add anything to the response capabilities,” said Doug Lentsch, who was chief of the Coast Guard’s Pollution Response Branch in Washington, D. C., during the Exxon Valdez disaster and helped develop the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. “When that stuff happens, you actually take away the ability of the unified command to get their job done.”

Melissa Sellers, the governor’s communications director, said in a statement that the state was forced to be proactive and act on its own because of the slow response and a lack of information from BP and the federal authorities.

“The bottom line is that this is an emergency situation,” Ms. Sellers said. “It demands quick action and quick thinking, and especially common sense. We continue to ask the federal government and BP to join us in this fight and battle this oil spill with the sense of urgency that the protection of our state demands.”

But a review of Louisiana’s prespill preparation suggests that the state may be open to the same criticisms that Mr. Jindal has leveled at BP and federal authorities.

The state has an oil spill coordinator’s office. Its staff shrank by half over the last decade, and the 17-year-old oil spill research and development program that is associated with the office had its annual $750,000 in financing cut last year. The coordinator is responsible for drawing up and signing off on spill contingency plans with the Coast Guard and a committee of federal, state and local officials.

Some of these plans are rife with omissions, including pages of blank charts that are supposed to detail available supplies of equipment like oil-skimming vessels. A draft action plan for a worst case is among many requirements in the southeast Louisiana proposal listed as “to be developed.”

State officials said that many of those gaps had been addressed but that the information had not yet been formally incorporated into the plan by the Coast Guard.

The plans, in conjunction with state and federal laws, do outline a response structure, called a unified command. In the event of a spill, state officials, the responsible party and the federal authorities, usually the Coast Guard, are supposed to work together to marshal resources and create day-to-day action plans.

From the first days of the spill, state representatives at a command center in Houma, La., have been following that script, signing off on the action plans with the Coast Guard and BP.

But on the first weekend in May, after the governor declared a state of emergency and weeks before heavy oil began to hit the coast, senior members of the Jindal administration decided the unified command was not working.

“We very quickly ran into challenges with the different entities carrying out their responsibilities under that framework,” said Garret Graves, the director of the governor’s office of coastal activities, citing a lack of urgency and decisiveness by the Coast Guard. “That’s where I think the inefficiencies were realized, and that’s why the state began taking an alternative path.”

“I don’t think the Coast Guard or BP had a familiarity with disaster posture,” Mr. Graves added.

On May 3, Mr. Jindal went public with his dissatisfaction.

“We kept being assured over and over that they had a plan, that there was a detailed plan, that it was coming; we never got that plan,” he said.

But under the law, oil spill experts said, there are only two kinds of government plans pertaining to spills, and the state is partly responsible for both.

There are area contingency plans, which the state helps draw up and are meant to be in place when a spill occurs; and there are action plans, which the state helps put together on a day-to-day basis after a spill.

It is just as much the state’s responsibility as anyone’s if a spill occurs and there is no up-to-date contingency plan, said Donald S. Jensen, a retired Coast Guard captain who coordinated the response to several major oil spills.

"After a spill happens is not the time to make a plan," he added.

Nevertheless, state and parish officials drew up their own response plan, a process that usually takes months, over that weekend.

The amount of hard boom the state requested, roughly 950 miles or about one and a half times the national stockpile, was more than three times what the southeast Louisiana area contingency plan said would be required to boom the state’s entire coastline.

“I think it’s proven to be not real reasonable,” said Todd Paxton, general manager of Cook Inlet Spill Prevention and Response Inc., an Alaska company. “For one, it’s just a huge amount of boom.”

A call to put out large amounts of that boom immediately, experts said, was also problematic, as boom can quickly be rendered useless by waves and tides if deployed too early.

Still, the unified command put much of the state and parish plan into effect over the next few weeks, while also continuing to draw up its day-to-day action plans.

A little over a week later, Mr. Jindal began to push a sand berm strategy.

Working off an idea put forward by a pair of Dutch marine research and engineering firms, the plan called for the construction of 140 miles of sand barriers, in 24 segments, to protect the inner coastline from oil. Such an idea is also discussed, though not in great detail, in one of the state’s area contingency plans.

Just before midnight on May 11, the state requested an emergency permit for the project from the Army Corps of Engineers. At just three pages, it was intentionally vague, Mr. Graves said, on the understanding that it was likely to need modifications.

Within days the governor began to decry the slow wheels of government.

“While we’re continuing to push the Corps to give us this permit and the Coast Guard and BP to approve this, we’re not letting the bureaucracy stop us,” Mr. Jindal said on May 14.

By that time, federal agencies had already raised serious concerns about the sand berm project, which, by one estimate, could cost nearly $1 billion.

The project would take months — at least three for the first berm to be built and six or more for the whole project to be finished — causing some experts and federal officials to wonder whether it would do any good. Others questioned whether it could make the problem worse: as the berms were being constructed, an analysis from the Environmental Protection Agency read, “the flow of water through unbermed portions could accelerate, potentially creating a funneling effect for the oil.”

A panel of local coastal scientists was put together by the state to direct the handling of the project. But even some members of that panel have expressed deep skepticism about the plan, though none wanted to be quoted on the matter.

While a series of revisions was being made by state and federal agencies, Mr. Jindal kept up the political pressure, saying on June 2 that 10 miles of berms could have already been constructed if the federal government had immediately granted the permit.

The next day, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the national incident commander for the spill, approved the building and financing, at BP’s expense, of six of the berms at a cost of $360 million, saying he was satisfied that they “will effectively stem potential damage” to the shoreline.

But the public disagreements have not stopped. This week federal authorities halted the dredging of sand for the berms in a certain part of the Chandeleur Islands, saying it violated the state’s permit and could jeopardize the islands themselves.

Mr. Jindal replied by urging the federal government to “get out of the way” of a necessary defense strategy.

The state engineering firm has nevertheless suspended dredging for several days while it moves the equipment to comply with the permit.

The first barrier will be completed “no sooner than August,” said Gentry Brann, a spokeswoman for the Shaw Group, the engineering firm.

“It is a large construction process,” she said. “And it doesn’t happen overnight.”