Alalbama Governor Bob Riley slammed the Obama Administration for their poor response to the Gulf oil crisis.
The Alabama governor spoke with CNN yesterday:
“You can’t have a committee that are going to make decisions that impact this entire coastal area.”

18 US beaches may be ruined for decades from the spill and delayed cleanup activities including Queen Bess Island in Louisiana.
Clean-up workers pick up blobs of oil in absorbent snare on Queen Bess Island at the mouth of Barataria Bay near the Gulf of Mexico in Plaquemines Parish, La., Friday, June 4, 2010.
A key governor on Sunday blasted the lack of leadership in the US response to the worst ever US oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, saying decisions were being gummed up in committee.

Governor Bob Riley of Alabama said he was more frustrated with the Obama administration’s lack of coordination and unity of purpose than he was BP, the British energy giant blamed for the spill.

“You can’t have a committee making the decisions that are going to impact this entire coastal area,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

Riley, a Republican, said decisions were being stalled because each government agency represented on the “unified command” running the response has a veto on decisions advanced by other government agencies.

As an example, he said a Coast Guard plan for protecting the Alabama shoreline has been held up for 45 days because another member of the committee is reviewing it.

“You can’t continue to do that. We’re going to have to have one person who makes the call on what we do and where,” he said.

The Obama Administration turned down offers to help clean up the spill from The Netherlands and the British Government just days after the explosion. They didn’t have the proper paperwork. The administration still has not given the OK to allow emergency workers to use a Maine company’s oil boom even though they were made aware of the warehouse full of containment boom back on May 21.
A high-level British offer of help to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was rebuffed by Obama shortly after the accident, fuelling fresh fears of political tension between the two countries over the disaster.

A few days after the BP-leased rig sank on April 22, the Cabinet Office made a direct offer to the US State Department to airlift half of Britain’s 1,200-tonne stockpile of chemical dispersants, The Times has learnt.

At the time there was an urgent demand for fresh supplies. The offer to provide the chemicals, at the cost price of £3 million, was made through diplomatic channels and via the Civil Contingency Secretariat, the Government’s emergency planning unit.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which was also involved in drafting the plan, said that the Obama had chosen not to accept the offer. Officials said the US claimed that the chemicals held in Britain did not have the correct paperwork.