A former Louisiana cabinet official is fending off criticism about the way he managed a program to ensure seafood from the Gulf of Mexico was safe to eat after a massive oil spill in 2010.
Robert Barham pushed back against auditors’ suggestions the work was shoddy, saying in an interview with The Associated Press that he has no question the seafood was tested thoroughly after the spill, which was sparked by a broken rig and led to the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
“With absolutely no equivocation, I not only feel confident that everything we said was true, but that we did everything that we needed to do to ensure that it is safe,” Barham says.
The Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office says it found insufficient sampling of fish, excessive spending and missing property in part of the $10.5 million BP-financed seafood safety program overseen by the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, when Barham was agency secretary.
State auditors found that Gulf oil spill recovery money intended for the fish testing instead paid for unnecessary iPads, cameras, boats and now-missing fishing equipment.
A preliminary draft of the auditor’s report, which hasn’t been released publicly but was obtained by The AP, described the fish testing program as so mismanaged that it couldn’t determine if the seafood was safe from contamination.
Barham, who now oversees the Office of State Parks, says auditors inappropriately relied on the memorandum of understanding signed between the state and energy giant BP PLC, which paid for the program, to determine whether enough testing was done. The testing plans changed, he says, as it became clearer how the oil was moving after the spill.
“If we were not doing what BP wanted, don’t you think they would have raised that issue?” Barham says. “It’s ludicrous that they wouldn’t have objected if they thought we were misspending.”
