La. still dealing with Katrina oil spills

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 19 (UPI) -- Louisiana, while coping with the BP oil spill, says it is still assessing the damage from 11 million gallons of oil spilled in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina.

Five years after Katrina and Hurricane Rita, several state and federal agencies are still in the earliest steps of the natural resource damage assessment process required under the federal Oil Spill Act of 1990, The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune reported Thursday.

The assessment was put on hold when both state and federal officials involved were reassigned to begin a similar investigation for the BP oil spills, the newspaper said.

The complexity of the Katrina-Rita spills, caused by 540 individual spills from broken pipelines and failures in storage structures, has delayed the completion of the assessment, officials said.

"The biggest issue slowing us down are the circumstances of the spills," Tony Penn, Gulf branch chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Damage Assessment Center, said.

"They occurred during hurricanes and we don't know all the details of how the releases occurred, where the oil went, whether any damage was compounded by the hurricane."

The amount of oil released during Katrina and Rita equals that released during the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, although it's only a fraction of the estimated 206 million gallons released during the BP accident, The Times-Picayune reported.