Early on a Friday morning inside the Emergency Operations Center in Belle Chasse, La., a crowded room is filled with chatter from National Guard advisors, Coast Guard officials, DEQ representatives, EPA agents, Plaquemines Parish officials and a smattering of media, both national and local, all awaiting the entrance of Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser.
Day 46 of the Gulf oil spill has arrived and to hear Nungesser, a man whose political star has risen fast while his parish is barely treading water, tell it, Plaquemines Parish once again is fighting for its life.
The imposing firebrand has been all over the airwaves – talk radio, cable talk shows, national news – and as passionately as he can, Nungesser will tell the story to anyone who will listen that his parish is dying.
The room goes silent as Nungesser enters and before he has barely sat down at the head of the large table for the Friday morning briefing, he simply asks, “Is there a rep from BP here today?”
“There will not be a rep from BP here today,” an assistant replies while looking down at the early morning reports.
Hours before he is set to meet President Barack Obama, blood rushes to Nungesser’s face.
Another Oily Morning
It was about 8:15 a.m., and looking at his face, the morning was not off to a good start. More oil had washed ashore overnight -- two Plaquemines officials looking at digital photos said oil they found on the beaches was “like peanut butter” and “squirted like chocolate syrup” -- and the company responsible for the disaster, the one supposed to be leading the clean up, was nowhere to be found. He also was questioning whether a contractor hired to skim the waters was accurately reporting what resources they had deployed.
With no BP rep, the Coast Guard official, Capt. Sam Honea, would feel the brunt from Nungesser as he boiled over with news that there weren’t enough skimmer boats to attack the encroaching oil while other skimmer boats sat idle in warehouses. He seemed desperate.
“I’m telling you, Sam, we got to do something,” Nungesser said. “I’m getting told two different stories out of Venice. They denied our clean-up crews. It ain’t a good day. I’m gonna meet with the president, I wanna go with good news. We got oil all in Barataria Bay. We got one skimmer boat. That’s unacceptable.”
“We’ve been asking for a plan since Day 1 and we still haven’t gotten one,” he said, looking Honea directly in the eye. “Wiping the blades of grass ain’t cutting it.”
Barely audible to the large room, Honea said he would see what he could do.
Worried that he wasn’t getting enough material for the fight, with bureaucracy dragging down the response and learning that what resources he did have might be shifted from his parish to fight oil coming ashore in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, he threatened he would have his sheriff stop anyone trying to remove any equipment to fight the oil spill from Plaquemines.
Living in Disaster Limbo
Nungesser, a massive man with a gravely, booming voice and an outspoken nature, has become the face of outrage for the oil spill. The media is seeking out Nungesser because, unlike many government officials, he pulls no punches and says exactly what is on his mind; he is that man openly expressing the uncensored frustration the nation feels as oil chokes the coast of Louisiana.
But for him, it is personal, as his home has become ground zero.
Since the death of 11 oil rig workers aboard the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon and the arrival of oil on Louisiana's coast, emotions have changed rapidly: Initial shock turned to sadness, sadness turned to helplessness, vulnerability has turned to anger and finally to outrage at the inability to stop the millions of gallons of oil spewing from the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico fouling the wetlands.
Frustration has mounted as Americans watch real-time video from 5,000 feet deep in the ocean showing BP’s different missions -- Top Hat, Top Kill, Junk Shot -- all failing, meaning no end to the oil coming to the coast.
In the uncertainty and near endless nature of the crisis, finger-pointing has abounded, congressional hearings already are being held and criminal investigations are in progress. In this mix, political fortunes and careers have risen and fallen quickly in the need to find the some certainty in the wake of the oil spill, finding just who are the scapegoats, the villains, the negligent and the heroes.
Into this frustration, Nungesser has stepped in and seized the populist spotlight.
Despite an often wry smile, his face can’t hide the exhaustion of the past five years – riding out and surviving Hurricane Katrina at his home in Plaquemines, enduring and leading the parish government through hurricanes Ike and Gustav – and his body, which by his account has added 90 pounds to his frame, shows the physical wear and tear since he became parish president in 2007.
It was a tepid local response from Hurricane Katrina that propelled Nungesser, who was outraged then at the lack of leadership, to run for president of the parish. Living in a disaster limbo, he and his fiancée have been engaged for nearly five years since Katrina initially postponed their wedding. Then his election and two hurricanes, Ike and Gustav, got in the way.
“Every time we try to plan, we have a disaster,” he said. “It might be telling me something.”
And now he is facing an enormous crisis, this time environmental, in Plaquemines Parish. Working nearly around the clock, much like the additional weight he has carried since Katrina, his eyes show the emotional burden he is carrying on his back.
“I have to look the people in the eyes of this parish that are losing their livelihoods, and possibly forever,” he said later after the EOC briefing in his office as he described what is driving him relentlessly.
Since the spill started, he says he sleeps about three hours night. “I got four and a half one night and I did get to go see my mom once; so, it’s been a marathon.”
He says he’ll keep this pace up as long as it takes.
“I feel fine,” he assured, admitting that his mother had made him check his blood pressure when he visited her, which he said was normal, though his fiancée has seen her blood pressure spike from the stress.
The Most Wanted Man
Endowed with a larger-than-life persona and with deadly quick wit, Nungesser’s personality amid the crisis and long hours he is working shifts fast from using deep sarcasm to keep from crying to dead seriousness when he sees his parish being coated in oil. Parish spokesman Kurt Fromherz rattled off a laundry list of national media outlets that have interviewed or want interviews from Nungesser. “They want him,” he said simply.
And since the oil spill began, The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, Anderson Cooper, G4 TV, The Walton and Johnson Morning Show, and Sean Hannity have come calling. They are just some of the interviews granted or requested, according to Fromherz. He said Nungesser is only getting asked for more interviews every day.
“He says it like it is,” Fromherz said, trying to explain Nungesser’s soaring popularity, “and he doesn’t hold back.”
When BP CEO Tony Hayward doubted large plumes of oil were spotted in the waters of Plaquemines Parish, Nungesser responded bluntly, “Let’s take him out there, dunk him in the water and then pull him out. And when he comes out black, let’s ask him the same question.” See the video
Sparing no one in his attempt to rescue his parish, Nungesser has admonished the president for not doing his job, railed against Coast Guard leadership and hammered almost anyone, especially BP, who he feels isn’t doing their job to help Plaquemines Parish.
“The minute that I feel we got the right teams responding quickly, you won’t see me in the press, you won’t see me bashing anybody.”
No Regrets
“I think I speak the truth and I speak from here,” Nungesser said, pointing at his heart to explain his blunt way of speaking publically. “My dad always told me, as long as I got right on my side, you can’t do no wrong.”
Asked about his popularity, he said, “I don’t know. I don’t really see the big deal. I got 4,000 e-mails at home… from people all over the country -- one from Africa, Australia -- complimenting me on my approach.
“I don’t walk in front that camera knowing what I’m gonna say. It just comes out and it’s not rehearsed.”
He said he has no regrets for his bombastic approach. But the only one he could think of since the disaster began was not pushing for the barrier island plan sooner, which after enough arm-twisting, has been approved. BP is expected to pick up the tab.
For all the sound bites and bluster that are making him a star on the news circuit, what is driving Nungesser becomes crystal clear when talking about the Plaquemines’ coast.
“I think that’s the toughest thing for me. I know what’s at risk, I know what’s at stake,” he said, emphasizing that 70 percent of migratory birds make homes in his parish, “and I don’t think America, I don’t think BP, surely doesn’t get it -- and I’m not sure the Coast Guard fully grasps it yet.”
But he is without a silver bullet or magic wand to plug the leak and his coast continues to get ruined, and it won’t go away tomorrow or the next day. So in the meantime, he makes his large presence felt to keep attention and pressure where he thinks it needs to be.
“If this oil wipes out coastal Louisiana -- and I still don’t think America understands the importance of these wetlands, these marshes -- until you’ve pulled into there with a boat and seen the fish jumping all over and the life in that marsh, you can’t really understand what’s dying,” he said.
“It’s not just a patch of grass.”
