By Gerald Helguero: Subscribe to Gerald's RSS feed
June 18, 2010 4:03 PM EDT
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal criticized the federal government's response to the oil spill on Thursday, calling for increased urgency in coordinating with local cleanup efforts, following a delay in deploying vacuum boats.
"It is frustrating because it doesn't seem like the left hand knows what the right hand is doing," Jindal said in a release. "There is no streamlined system here. This is why we keep stressing that we need to see more of a sense of urgency from the Coast Guard, federal officials and BP."
The U.S. Coast Guard on Thursday gave the go-ahead to use large boats outfitted with powerful vacuums commissioned by the state in the ongoing efforts in the Gulf of Mexico to clean up oil from BP's ruptured well. Coast Guard permission came after a 24-hour delay over concerns about the vessels' stability and their lack of lifesaving and firefighting equipment.
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Jindal said the delay was imposed and inspections ordered after the Coast Guard and the state had worked together "for weeks" on the boats, developing a prototype and ordering 16 of the vessels to clean oil from the state's polluted marshlands.
"Now, they have been told they don't need these inspections," Jindal said.
The Coast Guard said Thursday that all concerns had been addressed and that the vessels were deemed safe for crew members.
"There are times when you have to make trade-offs between the effectiveness of the response and the safety of individuals," Thad Allen, the Coast Guard admiral in charge of the Obama administration's response to the spill, told reporters. "I don't think there's anybody in this country that would want to sacrifice the safety of one of our responders if we could somehow avoid it."
Coast Guard Capt. Roger Laferriere, who is in charge of general vessel safety and inspections in Louisiana, said that while the Coast Guard supports the vacuum barge project and that cleanup is a priority "we will never compromise" response workers' safety.
Each vacuum boat can suck up to 96,000 gallons of liquid within a 24-hour period.
It has been 60 days since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up, killing 11 men and rupturing a well pipe nearly a mile underwater. Thje well has not yet been plugged and oil continues to gush into the Gulf.
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