"It's a sucker punch," said Terrebone Parish president Michel Claudet.

The coastal parish is reeling from the impact of the oil coating its marshes and bayous, shutting huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing and threatening a way of life treasured for generations.

The combination of both the oil and fishing industries being hit is potentially deadly for the local economy.

"The reason it's even worse is because historically when one industry is down they drifted to the other one," Claudet told AFP.

The Louisiana Economic Development department estimates the six month moratorium on exploratory drilling announced by Obama last month will translate into the loss of up to 10,000 jobs within a few months.

Many will be here in Terrebone Parish where 60 percent of the local economy is tied to the oil and gas industry, from the people who ferry the workers out to platforms to those who build the pipes.

"Of the people in my parish who've been affected by the spill I've yet to talk to one person in favor of the moratorium," Claudet said.

The reason is simple, said Kimberly Chauvin a commercial fisherman and dock owner who just spent 60,000 dollars expanding her processing plant and is afraid she'll never get the money back.

"I have family in the oil and gas industry," she said.

Investment firm Morgan Stanley estimated last week it could take up to 18 months for the Obama administration to complete a review of the offshore drilling industry, too long perhaps for some local businesses reliant on the industry to survive.

Several of the 33 rigs affected by the moratorium are already preparing to leave for friendlier waters and experts warn it could take years to replace them because global demand is so high.

Obama announced Monday a multi-agency bid to aid the stricken seafood industry and restore consumer confidence by introducing rigorous testing procedures to ensure products from the region are safe to eat.

"There is a sense that this disaster is not only threatening our fishermen and our shrimpers and oystermen, not only affecting potentially precious marshes and wetlands and estuaries and waters that are part of what makes the Gulf coast so special," Obama said after meeting local officials.

"There's also a fear that it could have a long-term impact on a way of life that has been passed on for generations. And I understand that fear."

But for many here, the moratorium is the greater threat.

Months after he retired from running Port Fourchon, Ted Falgout has been asked to help Louisiana lobby to get the moratorium lifted and cope with the aftermath.

In his 30 years as executive director of the port, Falgout has seen the region transformed from a collection of fishing villages to a prosperous industrial powerhouse.

State figures show the oil and gas industry supports 320,000 jobs, 12.7 billion dollars in wages and 70.2 billion dollars in business sales.

People here take pride in the fact that the Gulf supplies a third of the nation's oil production and that they are helping to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil.

"It's nice to say you can go on unemployment, but our people don't want to be on unemployment," Falgout said in an interview. "They want to work."

He argued that the moratorium simply doesn't make sense as nearly 50,000 other wells have been drilled in US waters without major incident, 700 of which are as deep or deeper than the one at the center of this disaster.

With BP's total liabilities for the cleanup, government penalties and compensation to those affected estimated to be between 30 and 100 billion dollars, there is also a clear incentive to do everything possible to avoid another blowout, Falgout suggested.

And shipping oil in by tankers is far riskier than bringing it in from offshore wells by pipe, he said.

"We're collateral damage for a political decision to make the rest of the country feel, 'Okay, we did something.'"

Falgout admitted safety regulations and government oversight needed to be reviewed but said: "You tell me we can't do more than two things at a time in this country."

earlier related report
Obama hopes for deal soon with BP on disaster claims
Theodore, Alabama (AFP) June 14, 2010 - President Barack Obama said he hoped for an outline deal with BP by Wednesday on a multi-billion dollar fund for oil disaster victims and vowed to use all his power to heal the Gulf coast.

Obama lunched with locals, talked up tourism and seafood industries and checked on disaster mitigation efforts during his fourth trip to the region, on the eve of his Oval Office address on America's worst environmental disaster.

It was another rough day for London-based energy giant BP, as its already reeling stock took another pounding. The company did however unveil new plans to staunch the flow of oil for a busted undersea Gulf of Mexico well.

Following days of lashing BP over its response to the crisis, Obama said Monday talks with the London-based giant had been "constructive" after the administration pressed for an escrow account to compensate disaster victims.

While it was still too early to comment on preliminary discussions, Obama raised hopes of a breakthrough before his planned meeting with BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg at the White House on Wednesday.

"My hope is that by the time the chairman and I meet on Wednesday that we've made sufficient progress that we can start actually seeing a structure that would be in place," he said at a staging post for oil clean-up efforts.

White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton said that the fund, to quickly process legitimate claims for compensation for people who had seen livelihoods hit by the disaster, would reach "billions" of dollars.

Obama's visit to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida represented a new bid to engineer a political pivot point in the two-month environmental and political crisis unleashed by the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in April.

His three previous visits to the disaster zone took in Louisiana, but the expanded itinerary was a sign of the widening footprint of the crisis spawned by the massive oil slick, and the rising criticism of his own performance.

Obama also lamented the threat to the unique Gulf of Mexico coastline, with its wetlands brimming with wildlife, sparkling white beaches and lucrative fishing industry in waters teeming with shrimps, crabs and edible fish.

A large chunk of those fishing grounds are now closed, as the oil pours out of a busted undersea well BP has tried but failed to plug, and some fishing fleets are tied up in port with little hope of resuming work.

Obama said he understood fears that the thick oil slick, which has clogged wetlands, fouled beaches and killed seabirds, could "have a long-term impact on a way of life that has been passed on for generations."

He said his administration would do "everything in our power to protect the Gulf way of life so that it's there for our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren."

In Gulfport, Mississippi, the president munched on shrimp and mini crab cakes to show local seafood was safe and implored Americans to visit the dazzling white sands of the southern coast.

Later in Theodore, Alabama, he said: "Let me be clear. Seafood from the Gulf today is safe to eat but we need to make sure it stays that way," announcing a multi-agency effort to protect the regional seafood industry.

To prove his point, Obama also had seafood for dinner, ordering crab claws, crawfish tails, ribs and nachos at a restaurant on route to his overnight stop of Pensacola, Florida.

Washington-based news organization Politico earlier ran an interview in which Obama vowed to push for a radical overhaul of US energy policy to wean the country off foreign oil and dangerously deep drilling.

"In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come," Obama said.

In London, BP shares plunged more than nine percent on Monday to 355 pence as investors fretted over the spiralling cost of the Gulf Mexico oil spill crisis and the future of the group's shareholder dividend.

Earlier reports suggested BP would bow to massive US pressure and decide to suspend dividend payments as its potential liability over the oil spill soars.

Obama administration officials said that BP met a 48-hour ultimatum Sunday to present a new plan to roughly triple the amount of oil it is capturing from the ruptured undersea well by the end of June, to more than 50,000 barrels, 2.1 million gallons, a day.

The company is currently siphoning up about 15,000 barrels of oil a day to a ship on the surface, about half the amount believed to be streaming into the Gulf from a well it has repeatedly failed to plug.

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