On Grand Isle, Louisiana yesterday evening I witnessed National Guard troops take oil booms that just minutes before were laid out on the beach, and put them in a dumpster. The troops deployed no oil booms into the water; the booms were only out on the beach for about an hour.
I wrote last night about our first day in Grand Isle; we came to the fishing pier, which was still open and looked out over the beach into the gulf. As we arrived at the pier staircase, about a dozen workers in blue shirts and bright yellow vests drove out of the park while a half dozen people in National Guard uniforms in golf carts drove down the beach.
We walked down the pier and surveyed the oil residue beneath. A seagull picks on a decaying fish in an oil sheen. To our left there’s probably 200 yards of boom in the water around the bend of the island, but the bulk of the coastline has none. About 300 yards down the beach in the other direction, there’s about two dozen National Guard troops with backhoes, four wheelers, and some oil boom.
They laid out several rows of oil booms as we watched from the pier. About an hour after they laid it out, they went back and picked it all up. At the time, we thought it was odd that they would take time to lay out boom on the beach and then just put it back away.
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/50800
Strange. Though there could be a logical explanation, something along the lines of the troops getting orders to deploy booms, then the orders change to not put out the booms but because of some regulation maybe they have to throw them away after unpacking. But still it's odd, why just throw the stuff out if it was never used?
