Jennifer Zdon for The New York Times

Reporting from Venice, La., and the surrounding marshlands on the shortage of containment booms to defend the gulf coastline against the oil from the spill, my colleague Rob Harris and I got a ground-level feel for the organization of the spill response.

On one hand, an impressive rhythm had been established, with each day beginning with an 8 a.m. meeting in the trailer version of a conference room. There, a dozen people each give a synopsis of the situation within their purview, leading off with a weather report. The crisp condensation of information on operations, logistics, medical matters and the day’s goals takes about 20 minutes.

On the other, for all of the declarations that the Coast Guard is in charge and that BP and federal officials want to be transparent with the news media, there are signs that the spill response command is not a clear top-down hierarchy. When you add in the other players like the contractors, things work or they don’t, reminding one of those old strings of Christmas-tree lights: one recalcitrant bulb can make the whole apparatus go dark.



In our case, we had set out to report on the work of Pete Parker of O’Brien’s Response Management, whose boom repair shop has proved crucial because of the shortage of containment booms. The story nearly went unchronicled because the security guards for Premier Industries, on whose dockyard the repairs were being made, ruled that the press passes issued to us by Coast Guard and BP security were not valid.

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Our guide, Chief Petty Officer John Kapsimalis, drove the 300 yards back to the main site and returned saying that everything was O.K. But the guards continued to refuse access. Finally, an open jeep appeared with four men who seemed in charge of that patch of ground. They talked to Officer Kapsimalis and threw me a hard hat. Then we were permitted to enter the dockyard — the same spot where we had met with Mr. Parker the day before without a problem — without interference.

Two days earlier, a representative of Heritage Environmental Services, a waste management company, was taking Rob along a beach on Grand Isle when he got a call from someone he said was his boss. The message: stop giving out information to the reporter, and do not take him to the staging area where the waste from the cleanup is being assembled.

When we did get to cleanup venues, however, from Fourchon Beach to the marshlands of Pass-a-Loutre in the Mississippi delta, the cleanup effort was fascinating. We watched people play out yards and yards of absorbent boom in the heat and humidity. We saw the motley flotilla of “vessels of opportunity,” all of those fishing and pleasure craft drafted into the spill effort. We saw a marshland invaded by oil and surrounded by yellow vinyl absorbent boom to keep the oil from spreading elsewhere.

And out in Blind Bay, perched on a pole that jutted from the water at least a quarter-mile from the nearest marshland, we saw one of the creatures on whose behalf the flotilla was engaged: a pelican, clearly oiled, making occasional efforts to spread its wings. It moved very little until we were almost out of hearing, then lifted its beak skyward and uttered a dull croak.