The Associated Press. June 10, 2010.
By SONIA SMITH, Associated Press Writer
BATON ROUGE La.—The lawyer hired to head Louisiana’s oil spill litigation said Thursday the state is working to determine who is to blame for the enormous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and what the long term environmental impact will be.
New Orleans attorney Allen Kanner, who has over 10 years of experience representing New Jersey in industrial pollution cases, declined to discuss specifics of Attorney General Buddy Caldwell’s strategy. But he said the office is balancing the “emergency du jour” with longer-term planning.
“We talk about what has to be done tomorrow, in six months and in six years,” Kanner said.
The state’s current priority is making BP the company that leased the Deepwater Horizon rig which exploded and sank in the Gulf in April open up its handling of oil spill claims to public scrutiny, Kanner said. After BP spent over a month refusing to share access to claims data, Caldwell filed a petition in state court last Friday.
Kanner said he has experience with natural resource damage assessments, which are required by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. Kanner has been helping the attorney general’s office hire experts with specialties ranging from microbiology to ornithology to economics to conduct these assessments. These experts will add up the numerous variables and determine how much it will cost to “restore the Gulf to its pre-spill condition,” Kanner said.
“If you break the Gulf and people can’t fish for 10 years, you have to pay for that cost as well as restore it to the way it was pre-pollution,” Kanner said.
Experts on dispersants, which have never before been used in such quantities or at such depths, will prove key to determine the spill’s ultimate impact, Kanner said.
“We’re not letting anyone off the hook if this turns out to just be a crazy science experiment,” he said.
Kanner said that the pool of experts all sides are drawing on is so small that some of the experts Caldwell’s office hired would often be approached the next day by BP’s lawyers with an offer.
Caldwell’s office is “vastly far ahead” of where his peer in Alaska was at this stage, Kanner said. But what the office does need, he added, is more money.
Caldwell has estimated his office will need $65 million and the ability to hire lawyers on contingency to bring home a multi-billion dollar settlement for the state. Gov. Bobby Jindal last week carved out $5 million of the $25 million oil spill grand from BP for Caldwell’s office.
Kanner, who has lived in New Orleans since the 1980s and often goes fishing in the Gulf, said this is more than just a case for him. “It’s about my life. It’s about the life we’re all going to lead 30, 40 years from now.”
“I hope to be in the Gulf fishing with my kids and my grandkids someday and I hope to be able to say, ‘look, we helped make this right,’” Kanner said.
Jennifer Roche, a spokeswoman for Caldwell’s office, said that Henry Dart of Covington, Allen Usry of New Orleans and Wade Shows of Baton Rouge have also been hired as outside counsel.