Oil Spill v. Katrina & Rita

“They’re both very different disasters, of course. But if you look at Katrina, you had a failure of federal levies that led to devastating disaster throughout all of south Louisiana and you had over 1,000 people lost their lives. Here you had another disaster that involved human error. Clearly the rig should not have blown up and testimony today even showed that this was a preventable accident. But you still had loss of life, which is tragic – 11 men lost their lives on the rig, you’ve got an entire way of life that’s in jeopardy right now. The concern that I hear on the ground, I hear actually a lot of the local leaders saying that this is a more dysfunctional response than Katrina in terms the government structure. But also that the President’s arbitrary ban on drilling, which is unrelated to the rig explosion, could be more devastating in the long term for our state than hurricane Katrina was and you hear that across the board from people in all kinds of industries. We’re still dealing with a lot of things. We would like it if the President actually spent his time helping us recover instead of, it seems like, he’s spending more time doing things that are harmful to Louisiana. So we’re asking the President: just don’t kick us while we’re down. It would be nice if you helped us right now and if you actually acted upon your job as President to lead this disaster as the law says, which he’s not done.”