NEW ORLEANS — For weeks, Governor Bobby Jindal has attacked BP and the Coast Guard for not having adequate plans and resources to battle the oil spill.

But interviews with state and federal officials and experts suggest that Louisiana, from the earliest days of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has often disregarded its own longstanding plans and specialists in favor of large-scale proposals that many say would probably have had limited effectiveness and could have even hampered the response.

The state’s approach has also at times appeared divided: While some state officials work alongside the Coast Guard and BP every day, others, including the governor, have championed a go-it-alone approach.

Such a stance is popular in a place justifiably skeptical of federal disaster response after Hurricane Katrina. The federal response, at times slow and disorganized, has been a matter of grave concern to this state, with its fragile coastline.

Jindal, a Republican like all but one of the other Gulf State governors, has been alone among them for his publicly critical stance toward the federal agencies in the response.

Experts said such antagonism could actually slow down that response.

“You can ask for the moon and say you didn’t get it, but I don’t think that’s going to add anything to the response capabilities,’’ said Doug Lentsch, who was chief of the Coast Guard’s Pollution Response Branch in Washington during the Exxon Valdez disaster. “When that stuff happens, you actually take away the ability of the unified command to get their job done.’’

A review of Louisiana’s pre-spill preparation suggests that the state may be open to the same criticisms that Jindal has leveled.

The state has an oil spill coordinator’s office. Its staff shrank by half over the last decade, and the 17-year-old oil spill research and development program that is associated with the office had its annual $750,000 in financing cut last year. The coordinator is responsible for drawing up and signing off on spill contingency plans with the Coast Guard and a committee of federal, state, and local officials.

Some of these plans are rife with omissions, including pages of blank charts that are supposed to detail supplies of such equipment as oil-skimming vessels.

A draft action plan for a worst-case scenario is among many requirements in the southeast Louisiana proposal listed as “to be developed.’’

State officials said that many of those gaps had been addressed but that the information had not yet been formally incorporated into the plan by the Coast Guard.

The plans, in conjunction with state and federal laws, outline a response structure, called a unified command. In the event of a spill, state officials, the responsible party, and federal authorities — usually the Coast Guard — are supposed to work together to marshal resources and create day-to-day action plans.

From the first days of the spill, state representatives at a command center in Houma have been following that script, signing off on the action plans with the Coast Guard and BP.

But on the first weekend in May, after the governor declared a state of emergency and weeks before heavy oil began to hit the coast, senior members of the Jindal administration decided the unified command was not working.

“We very quickly ran into challenges with the different entities carrying out their responsibilities under that framework,’’ said Garret Graves, director of the governor’s office of coastal activities, citing a lack of urgency and decisiveness by the Coast Guard. “That’s where I think the inefficiencies were realized, and that’s why the state began taking an alternative path.’’

Under the law, oil spill experts said, there are only two kinds of government plans pertaining to spills, and the state is partly responsible for both.

There are area contingency plans, which the state helps draw up and are meant to be in place when a spill occurs; and there are action plans, which the state helps put together on a day-to-day basis after a spill.

It is just as much the state’s responsibility as anyone’s if a spill occurs and there is no up-to-date contingency plan, said retired Coast Guard Captain Donald S. Jensen, a former federal on-scene coordinator for several oil spills.

In other news:

■ BP’s effort to drill a relief well through 2 1/2 miles of rock to stop the Gulf spill is on target for completion by mid-August, the oil company giant said yesterday.

■ The first tropical depression of the Atlantic season formed in the Caribbean, raising concerns about what might happen to efforts to contain the oil if bad weather forces BP to abandon its effort. It’s still too early to tell exactly where the storm might go and how it might affect oil on and below the surface of the Gulf.

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