Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in a news conference about the Gulf oil spill, with Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, second from left, and Gov. Bobby Jindal, third from right. (April Buffington/NYT Institute)

This story has been updated.

After flying over the Gulf of Mexico on Monday, two Cabinet officials joined Gov. Bobby Jindal in angry criticism of BP for failing to stop the ongoing spill and said the government was considering taking emergency measures to prevent oil from reaching Louisiana’s fragile wetlands.

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, and Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, expressed their frustration with BP. They were accompanied by a bipartisan Senate delegation that included Louisiana’s two U.S. senators.

In a speech at the Greater Lafourche Port Commission, Napolitano said the response to the oil spill was the largest ever in the nation, pouring an estimated 200,000 gallons a day into the Gulf.

“We came to fly over the site of the spill and see for ourselves what BP has done and not done,” Napolitano said. “We came to listen to the people of this area because they are directly impacted by the fact that this spill is still ongoing and is still not solved.”

In a news conference that followed, Napolitano and Jindal said the group wanted to explore all options to save Louisiana’s coastline, including burning oil at sea, trapping it with booms or building sand barriers along the shoreline.

“We have to take action into our own hands if we’re going to win this fight,” Jindal said. “Our goal is not to just clean up this oil once it hits our marshes. Our top goal must be to keep this oil out of our wetlands and marshes.”

The governor said the state had begun building sand barriers to block the oil, but continues to press the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for emergency permission to build them, which would help release federal funds. Without the barriers, he said, oil could start to kill the marshlands within five to seven days.

In their overflight of the Gulf, Jindal said, the group saw the thick, brown and black oil, which, they said, has already started to reach the nesting grounds of brown pelicans. The state bird, the pelican was removed from the endangered species list only a few months ago.

Salazar said the U.S. would press BP to pay reimbursements and damages to the many businesses affected by the spill.
“BP is the responsible party,” he said. “It is a horrible mess. They will be held accountable. We will keep our boot on their neck until the job gets done.”

Officials for BP did not respond to a request for comment on the officials’ remarks.

Until now, Louisiana has been protecting its shoreline with miles of long, white gauze-filled tubing, which soaks up the oil. This afternoon, for example, on Elmer’s Island near Grand Isle, work crews were collecting soiled tubes and putting them in plastic bags for disposal.

Jindal used the news conference on Monday to continue pressing federal officials for a more effective approach to blocking the oil. He stressed that Louisiana does not have the resources to protect the coast and that the problem is national in scope.

“These are America’s wetlands,” Jindal said. “This is not just about keeping oil off a rocky land, or a beach, but this is about a way of life for our people and our state.”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the spill was the largest in the nation.

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With an estimated 200,000 gallons a day of oil continuing to leak into the Gulf of Mexico, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said he has decided to take matters into his own hands.

After oil flowed into Barataria Bay, covering at least 12 miles of Louisiana’s marshes, coating the land and two pelican rookeries in crude, Jindal announced that he planned to move ahead with building sand barriers to protect the state’s coastline.

Just two days ago Jindal urged the approval of an emergency permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build more barriers. The Corps of Engineers is still reviewing the idea of sand barriers but hasn’t responded.

Jindal said he was no longer waiting for approval from the Corps of Engineers, according to The Associated Press.

On Saturday, tensions between BP and local authorities came to a boiling point in Jefferson Parish when local officials declared they were going to commandeer 40 boats of fishermen who had signed up to help with the spill but whose boats had since remained idle. They had spotted oil moving past the shoreline beaches through passes into Barataria Bay, which is surrounded by wildlife-rich wetlands.

“BP was not acting quickly enough in getting the skimmers and the booming boats out,” said Thomas Capella, a Jefferson Parish councilman. “If they weren’t going to do it, we’re going to do it ourselves.”

As soon as the boats were prepared, BP stepped in and began working to send the boats out, Capella said. As of Sunday, about 50 boats in the area were working to contain the oil and prevent more from seeping through the passes, he said.

With no signs of the oil spill stopping soon, BP said one of its efforts to slow the leak was no longer working effectively, according to The AP.

A mile-long tube has been used to siphon oil from the well to a ship. But BP spokesman John Curry said on Sunday that it siphoned some 57,120 gallons of oil within the past 24 hours, a sharp drop from the 92,400 gallons of oil a day that the device was sucking up on Friday.

The amount BP has collected in the tube has varied since it was installed last week. The device was siphoning 42,000 gallons of oil a day early that week, but at times Thursday, the siphon was collecting oil at a rate of as much as 210,000 gallons a day.

BP refused to provide day-by-day figures on how much oil the tube was diverting. Curry said the rate is expected to vary widely, in part because it is not just oil but also natural gas that is leaking. On Sunday, for instance, the siphon collected more than 7 million cubic feet of gas.

Because of claims that the oil spill was a manmade failure, the U.S. Department of Justice said it has began gathering information on the matter. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, however, that he would not release information on whether a criminal investigation has been opened.

The department was asked by the head of the Senate’s environmental committee, Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to determine if BP made false or misleading claims about its ability to prevent a serious oil spill, according to the AP.

BP has announced that on Tuesday it would try to shut off the leaking well with a “top kill,” in which cement and mud are pumped into the well. But the process of sealing offshore oil wells with cement has failed many times, the AP determined in an investigation.

On Monday, the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar; and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, and six members of a Senate delegation will be in the area. They are to fly over the affected areas and meet with Gov. Jindal and local officials.

In an attempt to connect with the concerns of the local community, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, a native of New Orleans, plans to visit residents of Venice and New Orleans. Jackson grew up in Pontchartrain Park in New Orleans and attended Tulane University.

In Mississippi, an environmental group called Coastal Rivers organized a cleanup of the garbage and debris surrounding Mississippi’s waterways and marshlands. According to The AP, the spokesman for the organization called it “a pre-emptive strike” against the oil spill. They plan to clean as much as they can so there will be less if the oil reaches the marshes in Mississippi.

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting

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Gov. Bobby Jindal is pushing for the creation of barrier islands to protect the delicate marshlands from oil creeping towards the Louisiana coast, but environmentalists said Wednesday that they doubt the plan will work.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which would approve the proposal, is reviewing it and is expected to respond within days.

If approved, Jindal’s plan would require both the federal government and BP to cover the estimated $350 million it would cost to dredge the Gulf of Mexico to fill the gaps in the barrier chain.

Jindal, who shunned the spotlight after his disastrous response to President Barack Obama’s address to Congress in February of last year, has drawn national attention by declaring a state of emergency, seeking federal assistance in the cleanup effort and holding almost daily news conferences on the spill.

During a boat tour Wednesday in Plaquemines Parish, whose coastline is threatened by the approaching oil slick, the governor said the spill “fundamentally threatens Louisiana’s way of life.”

“The oil is here, and the time to act is now,” the governor said in a press release Wednesday. “We are asking the Corps to approve our dredging plan without any further delay.”

But environmentalists are questioning the feasibility of the governor’s levee plan, saying dredging could take several months to build the barrier, which would need to be about 300 feet by 6 feet tall, to be effective.

“Seems a little late in the game,” said Mary Lee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network. “It doesn’t seem the most thought-out plan.”

BP officials, who have reviewed the plan, said they have identified several outstanding issues that need to be addressed before considering the proposal, including the effectiveness of the measure, the pace of construction and potential opposition from environmental groups that may delay the process. BP would be left in the lurch if it paid millions to build the barrier levees and then faced delays because of lawsuits brought by environmental groups.

“If permits are granted for this project,” asked Tom Mueller, BP spokesman, were officials certain that groups such as Sierra Club or Greenpeace “won’t sue to overturn permits, thus delaying the project for an indeterminate period of time?”

In addition to the buildup of the barrier islands, the governor is proposing other alternatives to contain the spread of the estimated 210,000 gallons of oil flowing into the Gulf each day. His alternatives include flexible tubes called “tiger dams” that are used to keep floodwaters at bay; metal baskets called “HESCO barriers” that have fabric sides and are filled with soil; and freshwater diversions, which is simply an injection of fresh water into the Gulf.

Paul Orr, an activist with the group Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper, called the governor’s plan ambitious and said it would take more than six months to dredge and build the barrier islands.

“It’s a huge engineering undertaking,’’ Orr said. “We’ve got 70,000 miles of coast if you take into account all the nooks and crannies.” He added, ”We appreciate that the governor is trying to think of ways to sum this up, but this doesn’t seem like the best answer that we’ve heard so far.”

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