Nungesser calls on Coast Guard to finish cleanup

By Amy Wold and Sandy Davis - The Advocate - 

With oil from the Deepwater Horizon still washing up on land, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser called on the U.S. Coast Guard to finish the cleanup before beginning the restoration phase.

“The Coast Guard’s role through this whole thing has been to get in the way of local government,” Nungesser said Wednesday. “We’re still fighting. They want to downsize.”

Nungesser said thousands of gallons of oil from BP’s ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico are still washing into the parish’s fragile marshes.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, the federal government’s on-scene coordinator, agreed Wednesday that there is still a lot of oil and a lot of cleanup work left to do — and, he added, he isn’t backing away from it.

Even though BP’s ruptured well was sealed 77 days ago, about 20,600 workers are still cleaning oil from 588 miles of shoreline as well as Louisiana’s marshlands, Zukunft said.

Barataria Bay and Bay Jimmy are two of the areas still heavily oiled, he said.

Zukunft blames bad weather and extremely high tides in June for driving oil deep into the marshes. Now, winds, tides and currents are moving some of that oil to new areas in the marshes, he said.

(Full article) 

 

Posted via email from