In a special report from the marshlands of Louisiana, Michael McCarthy meets the man in charge of defending the coast"Hell," says PJ Hahn, the man at the very tip of the sharp end of America's oil spill disaster, "we're under siege here
. If somebody was breaking into your house, would you get on the phone to friends and neighbours to discuss it? You'd shoot the sonofabitch. It's that simple."Blond-haired, blue-eyed, cowboy-booted - and very direct - PJ has what may be the toughest job of all in the Gulf of Mexico right now. He is personally responsible for preventing the oil that is pouring out of the shattered
Deepwater Horizon well from devastating his Louisiana coastal community, which is smack on the front line. And his frustration with bureaucracy hindering what he judges the right aggressive response has begun to reach boiling point, for he tells me without even pausing for breath: "If I were king, I would have two offices, the department of thinking outside the box, and the department of common sense, and I would throw everyone else out of there!"
PJ is director of coastal zone management for Plaquemines parish - a parish in Louisiana being the equivalent of a county in the other American states - with Plaquemines being the area of the bottom 70 miles of the Mississippi Delta, where the mighty river flows into the Gulf. A hundred miles across, most of Plaquemines is marshland, but marshland of enormous economic and ecological importance, as it is the nursery for the fish, shrimp and oysters that sustain the state's whopping seafood industry, and is also the winter refuge for hundreds of thousands of ducks and geese that arrive from all over America. Furthermore, it is an essential protective zone for New Orleans, just to the north, when tropical storms and hurricanes blow in. It is known as "the speedbump for New Orleans"
