Source:
NY TimesLouisiana Wants U.S. Help, and Its Own Way
Published: June 25, 2010
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.
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The Louisiana oil spill coordinator, whose office shrank considerably in the last decade and saw its oil spill research and development program lose its annual $750,000 in financing last year, 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.
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Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26jindal.html