Oil spill clean-up blocked by red tape
By Meena Hartenstein, Daily News.
As the BP oil spill continues to wreak havoc on the Gulf of Mexico, companies offering clean-up aid say their efforts are being blocked by bureaucratic red tape.
A French company volunteering oil-collection boats was rebuffed by BP and the Coast Guard, reports The New Orleans Times-Picayune, even as local officials complain that not enough vessels have been deployed to collect the oil in the water before it hits land.
Eric Vial, Chief Executive of French oil spill response company Ecoceane, met with BP and Coast Guard officials soon after the spill to volunteer a fleet of oil skimming boats but says weeks flew by without any response.
Vial ultimately sold nine of his boats to a private contractor in Florida to get around a longstanding law called the Jones Act that prevents foreign crews and foreign ships from transporting goods between U.S. ports. After the sale, the boats were no longer considered foreign and could be deployed into the Gulf, reports the Times-Picayune.
Other offers of aid also have been ignored. Fellow oil giant Shell was in talks with BP to loan out the Nanuq, a 300-foot oil recovery boat sitting unused in Alaska, but BP decided it didn’t want the help.
“Nothing would prevent it from working right now in the Gulf of Mexico,” Curtis Smith, a spokesman for Shell Alaska, told the Times-Picayune. “It remains available in the event that BP reconsiders.”
Meanwhile, local officials in the affected Gulf states have been begging for more skimmers to remove the oil. “We want all the skimming vessels in the world deployed,” Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told the Times-Picayune. “We’re at war. If you were at war and in charge, would you deploy everything you had to win the war?
Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the administration’s point person on the oil spill, admitted recently that “skimmers are our critical mass right now. We need to put those wherever we can get them. And we want to get them from wherever they are available.”
Yet even though 1600 skimmers are available across the country, as Sen. George LeMieux (R.-Fla) pointed out on the Senate floor last week, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 demands that regions must maintain minimum levels of that kind of equipment at all times, meaning not all resources can be directed to the Gulf.
Allen has said the administration is working to remove that hurdle, as well as grant waivers if needed for the Jones law.
But red tape also has stalled efforts by biologists in Barataria Bay, MSNBC reports, who are waiting for approval from Washington before they can implement clean-up tactics to save the marshlands.
“The bureaucracy is killing us,” Ralph Portier, an environmental biologist at Louisiana State University, told MSNBC.
As oil continues to spew into the Gulf, The Associated Press reports that these helping hands are not as generous as they seem. “These offers are not typically offers of aid,” said Lt. Erik Halvorson, a Coast Guard spokesman. “Normally, they are offers to sell resources to BP or the U.S. government.”
In fact, according to the AP, only Mexico offered the U.S. free help, saying it would give the U.S. government some containment boom. BP separately bought 13,780 feet of boom and two skimmers from Mexico in early May, according to the State Department.
And local officials who have loudly criticized Washington also are not even using all the help they’ve been offered.
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, whose office told ProPublica that staffers “spend more time fighting red tape and bureaucracy than we ever should have to,” is using only a fraction of his federal assistance. A CBS News investigation revealed that Jindal has deployed only 1,053 of the 6,000 available National Guard troops to fight the spill, and that other Gulf states also are using only small fractions of their troop allotments.
For now, oil spill recovery efforts will be stalled by more than red tape, BP and the Coast Guard announced Tuesday that rough weather caused by Tropical Storm Alex is forcing them to send skimming ships back to shore.
