Oil hits the marshes in the Mississippi delta at the weekend. Credit:Reuters "I have no question that BP is throwing everything at the problem to try to resolve it because this is an existential crisis for one of the world's largest companies," Salazar told reporters. "Do I have confidence that they know exactly what they're doing? No not completely." Salazar's comments came as President Barack Obama's administration came under increasing pressure for its response to the crisis amid accusations of lax supervision of the lucrative offshore oil drilling industry. Right-wing darling Sarah Palin accused Obama on Sunday of being lax in his response to the oil disaster and suggested this was because he was too close to the big oil companies.

The former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor, who champions off-shore drilling, criticised the media for not drawing the link between Obama and Big Oil and said if this spill had happened under former Republican president George W Bush the scrutiny would have been far tougher. "I don't know why the question isn't asked by the mainstream media and by others if there's any connection with the contributions made to president Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration," she told Fox News Sunday. More than $US3.5 million ($A4.21 million) has been given to candidates by BP in the past 20 years, with the largest single donation, $US77,051, going to Obama, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics. Palin suggested this close relationship explained why Obama was, "taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico." Do I have confidence that they [BP] know exactly what they're doing? No not completely

Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal demanded "a greater sense of urgency and a quicker turnaround time" in responding to the oil lapping up on beaches and coating fragile coastal wetlands. Jindal lambasted the Coast Guard, which is overseeing the response, for failing to deliver and lay out enough protective boom despite repeated requests from local officials who have been forced to "fill the current void in response efforts". "We met today to take action, take matters into our own hands," a frustrated Jindal told reporters in the coastal port of Venice. "We know we've got to do that if we're going to win this fight and protect our coast." A local emergency manager commandeered all 40 boom-laying boats hired by BP which were sitting idly at Grand Isle as oil sloshed onto beaches on Saturday night.

Residents and officials in neighbouring Plaquemines Parish headed out in their own boats on Sunday to lay protective booms around a bird sanctuary threatened by a black tide. Coast Guard Admiral Mary Landry acknowledged that the response had lagged, and told reporters she had called BP to task for failing to make sure boats didn't sit idle if there was work to be done. "There's really no excuse for not having constant activity," Landry said in a conference call. "That was my first issue we've had with BP over the past few days and we've directed them to improve and they have." But efforts to clean up the mess are stymied by the fact that the slick is still growing.

Initially scheduled to begin on Sunday, BP's latest attempt to plug a leak in the ruptured pipe 1.5 kilometres below the surface, the "top kill", is not expected to get under way until Wednesday at the earliest. As crews used robotic submarines to position equipment to inject heavy drilling fluids into the well and then seal it with cement, the amount of oil being suctioned up by a mile-long insertion tube slowed to 1360 barrels a day from the previous average of about 2,100. "It really depends largely on the mix between oil and gas," BP spokesman Graham MacEwan told Agence France-Presse. "It's not a constant flow so it will fluctuate over time." And while a fleet of skimmers did its best to contain the huge slick which has spread across the Gulf and begun to creep towards Florida, oil washed past protective booms, sullying about 100 kilometres of Louisiana's coastline.

Just how much oil is still gushing from the rig's wreckage has also been a major point of contention, with BP initially putting the figure at 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons (about 800,000 litres), a day. Independent experts have estimated that the flow from the two leaks could be as high as 120,000 barrels per day. The federal government has called in top US scientists to work on an accurate estimate on the flow rate out of the ruptured pipe and the actual size of the slick, with results expected sometime this week. AFP