The Ongoing Administration-Wide Response to the Deepwater BP Oil Spill

TUESDAY, MAY 4
Cross-posted from the White House Blog
Cabinet Officials Brief Members of Congress

Secretary Salazar, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Administrator Jackson, DHS Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute and Admiral Allen provided a bi-partisan and bi-cameral briefing to Congress on the administration’s all-hands-on-deck response to the spill. They updated members of Congress on the status of ongoing, coordinated response efforts in the Gulf coast states and delivered an update on BP’s mitigation plans for potentially impacted Gulf Coast states.

Cabinet Officials Host Daily Coordination Calls with the Gulf Coast State Governors

To ensure consistent coordination with the Gulf Coast states, Admiral Thad Allen, Secretaries Janet Napolitano and Ken Salazar, Administrator Lisa Jackson and NOAA Deputy Under Secretary Monica Medina began daily calls with the Governors from the five Gulf Coast states to provide updates on the response to the BP oil spill and answer any questions that arise. Governors Barbour, Crist, Jindal, Perry and Riley have been invited to participate in the daily calls moving forward. These daily calls are a follow up to the calls last Friday and Sunday between the Governors and the agencies involved in the federal response, as well as the calls last week between the President and the Governors and the President’s visit to the region on Sunday. These calls are intended to further the already unprecedented cooperation and focused effort between state and local officials and the federal government in response to this situation.

National Guard Activation

Secretary Gates has authorized use of Title 32 status for up to 17,500 National Guard members in four states: Alabama (3,000), Florida (2,500), Louisiana (6,000) and Mississippi (6,000).

The state of Louisiana has activated approximately 1,200 National Guard members under Title 32 for command and control and sandbagging operations in St Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. Louisiana National Guard personnel are actively manning the Joint Operations Center and Tactical Aviation Cell.

20 More Vessels and 4,500 Responders Are Deployed to the Gulf Coast

The response continues to mobilize and move more resources into the gulf to support BP, the responsible party, and apply federal resources to mitigate environmental damage, including moving 20 more vessels to the area and deploying an additional 4,500 responders

Air Quality Monitoring

EPA’s Air Quality Index (AQI) tracks levels of particulate matter and ozone along the Gulf Coast—data available publicly daily at http://www.airnow.gov/ and http://gulfcoast.airnowtech.org/. In addition to these monitors, EPA’s emergency response teams have put up multiple monitoring stations to track larger particulate matter. The location of these monitoring stations is flexible as conditions change during this response.

The next in a daily series of press briefings was conducted between the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Coast Guard, NOAA, BP and Transocean at the Joint Information Center in Robert, La., as well as daily legislative and intergovernmental calls.

Assets To Date—20 More Vessels and 4,000 Responders Arrive

Total response vessels: nearly 200
Boom deployed: 367,881 feet
Boom available: more than 1 million feet
Oily water recovered: more than 1 million gallons
Dispersant used: nearly 160,000 gallons
Dispersant available: 230,000 gallons
Overall personnel responding: approximately 7,500