Louisiana Coastal Parish President: ‘The Plan Is to Let Us Die’

Sabina Canfield
Courthouse News Service
June 6, 2010

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Almost 70 miles of Louisiana coast are soaked with oil. That’s more land than the seashores of Maryland and Delaware combined, Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday after Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano were flown over the devastated coast. Napolitano said the federal government would “disperse it, boom it, burn it,” to keep more oil from coming ashore. But St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro had a different idea. “I would be betting the plan is to let us die,” Taffaro said.

Federal officials delivered messages similar to Napolitano’s, but none wanted to address an incident that occurred last weekend, when BP and the Coast Guard abandoned 44 boats loaded with booms on Louisiana’s shores as thick black oil flooded into the marshlands.

BP was nowhere in sight as the oil inundated the fragile marshes. And the oil company has provided little explanation about what made it jump ship rather fight the oil as it hit land.

BP has continued to spray two chemical dispersants into the Gulf despite an order by the Environmental Protection Agency to end the spraying on Sunday night. The chemical dispersants, made by Corexit, are banned in BP’s homeland, the United Kingdom, because of their toxicity.

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This article was posted: Sunday, June 6, 2010 at 10:07 am

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