Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about the actual “cleanup” of this particular oil spill or toxic spill.
At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, a 911 call went out. The Coast Guard tells us that it had its cleanup boom in place at midnight. Then it changed it to say that it had the cleanup boom in place at 2 a.m. Then it changed that to say, right now, that it had the cleanup boom in place by 5:53 a.m., because it could not find the source of the spill. The person on the sailboat who made the 911 call the evening before at 5 p.m. said it took them 15 minutes to identify the source of the spill as the particular vessel that we were talking about.
Is this a world-class response? if we are to believe any of these stories, the slowest it took was seven hours to find the craft and put the boom in. Then it was nine hours. Now it is 13 hours. How do we trust and believe a Coast Guard that keeps changing its story when a vessel could find it in 15 minutes?