Today we went out to the spill site on a Sherpa plane operated by the Mississippi Army National Guard, one of the few fixed wing aircraft flown by the army and Mississippi has one of only 12 in the entire military.  This particular plane was used to transport Army Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan where they did low altitude, low opening insertions.  I will send a picture of it.

I have learned a lot about the people of the Coast, their passion, their resilience. They are, quite honestly, unlike any people I have met in Mississippi.

People have e-mailed me and asked if I were satisfied with what BP is doing.  My answer to that question is "yes." 

This is the first incident of its kind (this was NOT an accident).  There has been a long learning curve with regard to both clean up and care in the community. 

There will be plenty of lessons learned and with each group I have met with, I have asked, "Is there someone taking notes to make into an after action report?"  My concern is that if this happens again, the ramp up is one week instead of the nearly two it has taken.

But, THIS NEVER HAD TO HAPPEN!  I believe BP is a corporate snake in the grass and they did a lot to cover their behinds at the beginning.  I may have said last night that the $500 million they gave to various research universities is no more than a bribe because had they been really interested, they would have donated that money before the spill.

AND, I wonder out loud just what the heck was on our Governor's mind when he said that BP should have put that $20 BILLION into off shore drilling instead of an escrow account. 

Look, I meant what I said about the governor being a general's general, but gosh darn, sir, show some outward compassion.  You are not heading up an army and your constituents are not soldiers...they are people who can't work, are losing their livelihoods, and for many will lode it for a long time to come.

Somewhere between the President of the parish in Louisiana and our governor, there is a balance.

Off the soapbox.

BP is doing everything it can do both offshore and onshore.  There has been a long learning curve and I believe we are on the downhill side of that curve and in a sort of "the kinks have been worked out and the machinery is working" mode.  We just need to tweak it here and there.

Let me get to the flyover.  We saw little evidence of oil in Mississippi waters. With the exception of the far eastern waters, there's nothing.  For those of you who know the story of how the boundary was found between Mississippi and Louisiana a century or more ago, the same current that floated that whiskey barrel away from what is now Louisiana (once claimed by Mississippi) is also shunting the oil to Louisiana and Alabama.

What I found out today, the spill site is due south of Mobile Bay, although off of Louisiana.

Out in the open waters where the Feds have control (and not closed to all fishing) we started seeing ribbons of sheen for as far as you could see.  They move in and move out from the Coast.  Oil rigs of all description dot the seascape off of Louisiana beginning south of the Chandelier Island chain.  They are everywhere.

The skimmers were out there and there were a lot of them.  Two boats pull a boom much like a long fishing net, but without the underwater net. 

A can-like device is located where the boom string makes a curve from one boat to another.  The device rotates, skimming up the top layer of water.  The oil/water is shunted off through a pipe in the boom and onto a specially equipped boat that separates oil from water.

The oil is recovered to be made into such things as tar and asphalt.

Arriving at the spill site, we saw scores of vessels.  And, one would have thought that if someone lit a match, the whole place would go up in flames.  Oil was everywhere -- here and there we saw the deep blue color of the gulf, but the sheen was MONSTROUS.  In the middle of this organized mayhem was the large vessel pumping up the captured oil from the capped well.

A pipe on the side of the ship, a flame shot out, burning off the natural gas.  Another smaller boat had a HUGE flame coming out from a pipe that was being kept cool by another ship spraying water on it.  The flames were HUGE.  This was burning off gas from the other drilling platforms.

(Took a two-hour break here to go to dinner with daughter and her beau...The Oyster

House in Gulfport...killer gumbo and shrimp and grits).

Two platforms a couple hundred yards apart (albeit, they may have been closer) are drilling the relief wells.

The whole scene was reminiscent of a 1950's horror film where Godzilla was created by all the atomic testing.  I just knew a monster was going to rise out of all this oil, consume all the ships, and then set the whole place ablaze with the fire spreading on the oil sheen from Louisiana to Florida to Mexico.  That's what it is like out there.

And, I must chastise myself.  There was no sheen in most of the Mississippi waters and I felt somewhat like a guy going to a NSACAR race and there was no wreck.  But, the sheen we saw and the oil engulfing the spill site was sickening, heartbreaking, and you knew avoidable if someone had just said, "No.  Let's do it right."

On the way back, this time flying to Mobile Bay and Dauphin Island where oil has been spotted, we saw long orange streamers.  This is oil mixed with dispersant.  This will probably come on sure in the form of tar balls which when cooled (out of the sun), so to speak, harden to tar or an asphalt like substance.  They were everywhere off of Alabama.

Coming back, we got a briefing from DEQ and DMR.  Something new I learned (again) was that MDR has its own divers who have been diving in three-mile increments from the Alabama line to Louisiana, sampling water quality and taking samples.  They bring them into the State Office Building at Biloxi where DEQ tests them and shares their finds with a number of agencies and the Coast Guard.

At an afternoon briefing we learned just how much our Mississippi personnel are working, including the National Guard.  We met a Coast Guard Commander from Boston, who is actually a Reservist, having been called up with 1500 other Coast Guard Reservists for this event. 

The Coast Guard now has a senior grade officer assigned to every Parish Board in Louisiana, supervisor board in Mississippi, and whatever local board runs the show in Alabama and Florida that provides instant connection between local government and Coast Guard command which is running the whole show.

If you recall on my report three weeks ago, I asked the question, "Who is at the top of the Food Chain?"  No one could really answer, but now we know.

I do want to plug Mississippi again.  DMR, DEQ, the National Guard have the main command and control operation.  Their learning curve was short, having just gone through Katrina, and they are doing a really good job of addressing this "war."

I was asked by a reporter if I felt there was a lack of a sense of urgency.  I answered that he should have been here five-or-six weeks ago, when the whole thing was coming together.  There was a heightened sense of urgency. 

Now, and I mean this, the operation is like waiting for the enemy to attack.  A LOT is going on out in the Gulf to stop this oil out there.  Progressively coming to sure, there are lines of defenses that range from booms with cloth skirts to let the water pass through, but soak up oil; booms near harbors and bays, people trained to clean up tar balls, and people trained to clean the beach and marshes of oil.

Flights are made daily looking for sheens and resources are deployed as needed.  Even at night infrared imaging used to track insurgents in the warzone is used to detect approaching oil.

My questions this afternoon were like yesterday, "Are you addressing the human need with mental health issues (surprisingly it is not in the "planning" mix) and are you keeping a record for lessons learned and after action reports?

I won't go into a lot of detail, but I feel this mental health issue is really important.  These folks and especially the children have gone through a lot of disasters the last six years.

Well, I see I am repeating myself, so I'll quit.  I am attaching several pictures of the plane we flew on, the sheen that can be seen by the camera, the big rig sucking up the oil, the relief drilling platforms, inside the plane, the on-land staging area near I 10, and an example of skimming.

I opened the door to the plane, was tied to a handle, hung out the door, and snapped the pictures.  Reminded me of the days of Vietnam  I rode the skids of choppers for insertion into a hot LZ.....whoops, like BP, I'm losing integrity on that one.