Leadership and Crisis Read Free Page A

he wanted me to sign off on the use of subsea
dispersants, chemicals that would disperse the oil near where the leak was occurring. I had no real authority here. BP could do this with the approval of the Coast Guard. But he wanted legal cover, so he pressed me to sign off on it. I said I first wanted him to show me the science that the dispersants would not have adverse affects on the Gulf. When I expressed to him the need for us to build sand berms along the coast to help keep the oil out of the marshes, he was completely dismissive. He deemed the berms as more important in protecting the state against hurricanes than oil. (He failed to grasp the concept that a hurricane surge would bring more oil deeper into our marsh, making these barriers critical protection for both oil and hurricanes.) He was so arrogant he didn’t even want to listen to me make the case. He lacked the common sense even to pretend to be interested in what I was saying. He was tone-deaf and clueless. I thought to myself, I can’t believe this guy runs a multi-billion dollar company. This guy would not succeed as a used car salesman.
    If the oil spill crisis teaches us one thing, it is that a distant, central command and control model simply didn’t work with the fast-moving and ever-changing crisis that was unfolding. Frankly, some of the best leadership and advice we got was from local leaders, like the parish presidents and fishermen. As far as I can tell, none of them has yet to win a Nobel Prize, but they know these waters. And some of the best ideas for cleanup came from locals.
    Because the federal government was failing to provide the boom we needed, we came up with creative ideas—Tiger dams, Hesco Baskets, sand-drop operations, and freshwater diversions. It was a local initiative that gave us one of the best techniques for cleaning up: vacuum trucks. The federal government was having workers clean the marsh grasses with the equivalent of paper towels. We thought of the bright
idea of putting a large vacuum truck, like the kind that they use to clean Port-a-Potties, on top of a National Guard pontoon boat. They were highly effective in sucking up the oil.
    Another local innovation was the “jack up barge”—commonly used here to help the oil industry service rigs out in the water. The Coast Guard and BP couldn’t figure out how to rapidly deploy boom in response to specific oil sightings in marsh areas and to stretch their supplies instead of trying futilely to protect the entire coast, so Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungusser suggested that we use these barges that people could live on and supply them with lots of boom so response boats could stock up and go directly to oiled areas in the water in real time without having to come all the way back to the shore.
    In Grand Isle, they started using rigid pipe to act as a high water boom to help with the oil. There was such a void in the federal response—lack of boom, lack of approval on plans to use rocks and barges to stop the oil, to name a few—that they used this pipe to hold the oil back. It served as a barrier to protect vulnerable estuaries, and was yet another innovative use of ordinary oil field equipment. Simply put, working with locals we were able to use whatever we could get our hands on to stop oil from coming into our fragile marshes and waters. We did what the federal government just couldn’t: act quickly and efficiently to protect our shores. Unlike them, we were never satisfied with just doing nothing.
    We quickly discovered that the only way to get things done by either BP or the federal government was to go public. The national media was very helpful in this regard. When we asked for the Coast Guard to give us their plans for deploying and prioritizing boom to contain the oil spill, we heard nothing for more than a week. So we met with the parish presidents, and the next day we had our plans
posted online. We went on TV and explained our plan, and suddenly