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Louisianans take oil cleanup in own hands as frustration mounts
May 23 06:00 PM US/Eastern
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.936e144ccc4a23348cdcc0aec488b9ea.cb1&show_article=1

Frustrated Louisianans took the oil cleanup into their own hands Sunday, heading out in boats to lay protective booms around a bird sanctuary threatened by a black tide.
“We’re going out to Cat Island right now where a thousand pelicans are breeding,” Billy Nungesser, president of the coastal Plaquemines Parish told AFP.

Some of the birds at the island sanctuary have already been coated in oil and have carried it back to the nests, he said.

While they’re not trying to rescue the oiled birds for fear of doing more harm than good, Nungesser said local residents refused to stand idly by as more oil lapped up into the fragile wetland.

“Our crews are out there laying the absorbent boom,” he said, adding that he couldn’t understand why BP and the Coast Guard weren’t doing more to protect his coastal parish.

In neighboring Jefferson Parish an emergency manager commandeered all 40 boom-laying boats hired by BP which were sitting idly at Grand Isle as oil sloshed onto beaches.

Bloggers and callers to a radio talk show cheered the dramatic action late Saturday night, promising the official their votes if he sought elective office.

Earlier in the day, WWL-AM radio station repeatedly replayed a taped interview in which a Coast Guard official in Terrebonne Parish took the blame for not ordering BP to do more, then flippantly said: “I guess I’m just slow and dumb.”

Frustration has reached a boiling point as more delays stymie efforts to cap a pipe which has been gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico from the wreckage of a BP-leased rig some 52 miles off the coast of Louisiana since April 22.

Favorable winds and currents have kept the bulk of the massive slick offshore, but the heavy oil began to seep into coastal marshes on Wednesday and some 66 miles (106 km) of coastline and 30 acres (12 ha) of marshes are now affected.

The amount of oil being suctioned up to a waiting boat from a mile-long tube has slowed to 1,360 barrels a day from the previous average of about 2,100, BP said Sunday.

Meanwhile, a “top kill” attempt to plug the leak by injecting heavy drilling mud into the pipe which was originally set to begin Sunday has now been delayed to Wednesday.

The delays have fueled the outrage of locals, who are already wary of relying on government as a result of the chaos which followed after Hurricane Katrina tore through coastal Louisiana in 2005.

“Stop at any of the coffee shops here at Plaquemines Parish and people talk about the spill with disbelief,” Nungesser said.

“Number one, you hear — ‘there is no plan to stop it’. Second, we keep hearing this oil could come ashore for a year or longer even if they do seal the well.

“After Katrina, we knew what we were dealing with and went to work and things got a little better each day. With the spill, every day it gets a little worse and we don’t know what the worst-case scenario is going to be.”

Charter boat captain Brent Roy gloomily pondered BP’s failed efforts to seal the gushing well and government attempts to curb the damage.

“Until they kill that leak, I just don’t think the clean up is going to be very effective,” Roy said. “It just seems fruitless.”

Noting that June 1 — the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season — is only one week away, the boat captain worried how a major storm would impede BP’s contingency plan to stop the leak by drilling a relief well.

“Even after (hurricane) Katrina, we knew things would eventually get back to normal,” Roy said. “With the spill, we’re just unsure.”