Louisiana official on spill: Nobody in charge

A Louisiana official on Monday told the White House panel probing the BP oil spill that an adequate chain of command was never established during the disaster that unfolded over several months.

“This late in the game, I still can’t tell you who is in charge,” said Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, a coastal region that was on the front lines of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

His strong criticism of the federal response came at a Washington, D.C., hearing of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore drilling.

Nungesser told the bipartisan panel of several problems with the response, noting for instance that parish officials were unable to gain access to oil booms to help keep the oil away from the marshlands.

“BP would say it is the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard would say it is BP,” he said. “We never got a name, we never got a person in charge.”

“The frustrating thing was not knowing,” said Nungesser, whose parish has a major seafood industry.

There is a broad agreement that the spill should prompt both improved planning and better development of spill response technologies.

“We can’t be doing R&D in the middle of a spill response, which is what we tried to do this time,” said National Incident Commander Thad Allen, echoing other high level federal officials on the matter.