Obama assures Louisiana of aggressive response to oil spill

(MCT) — With the massive slick in the Gulf of Mexico tripling in size in 48 hours, President Barack Obama visited New Orleans on Sunday and promised to “do everything in our power” to mitigate a looming environmental disaster.

Although storms briefly grounded Coast Guard planes, reports of oil hitting land began flowing in, along with confirmed sightings of dead sea turtles, crabs and birds washing ashore in Pass Christian, Miss.

But capricious winds and waves in remote areas confounded efforts to establish exactly when the oil might hit, and Coast Guard officials still had no confirmation late Sunday of landfall.
The coast from Louisiana to Florida braced for the gooey mess to hit barrier islands of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, and the sandy beaches and casino enclaves crucial to the region’s tourism industry.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a 10-day restriction on commercial and recreational fishing from the mouth of the Mississippi River to Florida’s Pensacola Bay.

In Alabama, National Guard troops arrived on Dauphin Island to build a berm of sand containers.

BP Plc, the London-based oil company financially responsible for the deep sea well rupture 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, was put on the defensive as criticism mounted that too little was done too late to stop the slick.

BP Chairman Lamar McKay, speaking on ABC’s “The Week,” called the accident unforeseeable. He said BP engineers continued to believe that a broken “blowout preventer” — a valve that ensures the well is shut tight in an accident — had malfunctioned.

The break has allowed a fountain of oil — officially estimated at 5,000 barrels a day — to burst forth unchecked from the ocean floor, nearly a mile deep, out of reach of divers and all but the most specialized equipment. McKay compared the company’s efforts to shut the ruptured well to “doing open-heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark, with robot-controlled submarines.”

But there were signs that patience with BP’s efforts was growing strained. A day earlier, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal questioned whether BP had sufficient resources to respond to the crisis and declared that Louisiana officials were moving ahead with their own contingency plans. “We are past the point of waiting,” the statement said.