Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on Thursday that he lacks faith in BP and doesn’t trust the company to do the right thing in the aftermath of the oil spill.

The journalism organization invited Mr. Landrieu to speak about the progress New Orleans is making with its rebuilding efforts on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and about the effects the oil spill continues to have on his city.

Landrieu criticized BP’s cleanup efforts in the Gulf, telling the Press Club, “In my opinion, they’re poised to cut and run.”

“BP and others are acting like this is the beginning of the end. It is not,” Landrieu said. “We have no confidence in the claims that much of the oil is gone,” he added, explaining that a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report released on Tuesday “found 70 percent of the oil is still in the ecosystem. This is the beginning of the beginning,” Landrieu said.

New Orleans does not sit directly on the Gulf of Mexico, but the city is vitally linked to the Gulf environmentally and economically. Many seafood businesses in the city have had to shut down in the wake of the oil spill, New Orleans restaurants specializing in and serving seafood have been hurt, and the wetlands that help protect the city from hurricanes are threatened.

Landrieu said that preliminary data reveals that tourism is down 12 percent to 16 percent so far this year because of the spill – a blow that could cost the city still struggling to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina millions in revenue.

According to Landrieu, BP’s massive oil spill – the largest known oil spill in history – and Hurricane Katrina were both man-made disasters. New Orleans is protected from hurricanes by miles of rapidly disappearing coastal wetlands that serve as a buffer zone against tropical storms. As more and more square miles of the wetlands disappear every year due to commercial activity, New Orleans stands to take a more direct hit from Gulf storms. Also, the vast majority of the destruction in New Orleans after Katrina happened when man-made levees failed and 80 percent of the city was flooded.

Landrieu, like his younger sister Mary Landrieu, a Democratic Senator from Louisiana, is an ally of offshore drilling and an opponent of the Obama Administration’s temporary offshore drilling ban.

“It is not a zero-sum game,” Landrieu said, describing offshore drilling. “We are not limited to ‘drill baby drill’ or ‘stop drilling forever.’ We can do better. We must drill and restore.”

“We have had hell and high water, pain and salvation. We survived Katrina, Rita, Ike, Gustav, the great recession, and the BP oil catastrophe. And so the message is clear. Through it all, we are still standing. Unbowed, unbroken and ready to face whatever challenges come our way. Not because we want to, but because we have to.”

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