Mississippi coast faces environmental crisis

WAVELAND, Mississippi (Reuters) - Coastal Mississippi is facing its biggest environmental crisis since Hurricane Katrina as oil from a leaking BP well in the Gulf of Mexico fouls its beaches and creeps onto inshore wetlands.

People watched in horror on Thursday as high tides washed oil onto beaches in the southeast of the state and in some cases the chunks of hardened oil floating offshore were as big as a school bus, said Long Beach Mayor Billy Skellie.

The previous day, oily water breached a sea wall and cascaded onto a coast road, leaving sticky patches.

It also flowed into a stretch of marsh, coating around one mile of marsh grass where it has the potential to do long-term harm to a delicate ecosystem. In one spot, fishermen pulled crab traps from the marsh bed only to discover that all the crabs were dead.

Authorities also said the carcasses of 35 oiled seabirds were plucked from beaches and coastal areas of Mississippi on Wednesday, a higher-than-average daily total since oil first struck the state's 44-mile coastline on June 27.

Officials are confident of their ability to remove oil from beaches but cleaning it off wetlands is a much tougher proposition.

"It is now flowing freely into our inland marshes and that is exactly what we did not want to happen," said Mississippi Emergency Management Agency Director Brian Adam.

Katrina is best known for flooding New Orleans in Louisiana but it also ravaged neighboring Mississippi's coast with high winds and a storm surge that ripped through towns like Waveland, Pass Christian, Long Beach and Bay St Louis.

The disasters are not on a comparable scale since Katrina destroyed thousands of Mississippi homes but they share a common feature: on both occasions residents and officials said the government response was too slow.

This time, residents complain that BP and federal authorities have been tardy about deploying cleanup workers. As the oil washed ashore on Wednesday, there were only around 20 workers in Waveland.

COMPLAINTS DISMISSED

More than 100 were at work on Thursday, however, and BP said more were on the way.

"Frankly, we have been asking for more protection since the oil began spewing into the Gulf and we are so frustrated because it seems that BP wants the oil to come on shore," said Waveland Mayor Tommy Longo.

"We had an aggressive plan to stop this oil at the Barrier Islands ... but it is coming on shore anyway. Nobody knows what to do because we need resources. This fight takes technology," he said.

Coast Guard spokesman Commander Charles Diorio dismissed those complaints and said cleaning Mississippi's beaches was a top priority.

He acknowledged that high winds from Hurricane Alex, which passed through the Gulf last week, had prevented the deployment of vessels capable of skimming oil off the sea surface before it reaches the beach.

"We are working very hard in Mississippi and have been for the past several days, particularly along shore," Diorio said on a conference call from the Coast Guard's command center in Mobile, Alabama.

Groups of vessels were visible in the water on Thursday.

Louisiana's wetlands have been hardest hit by the leak that began April 20 with an explosion and fire on a BP rig that killed 11 workers. But stretches of coast in Alabama, Florida and, most recently, Texas are also affected.

(Additional reporting by Tom Brown in Miami; Writing by Matthew Bigg, editing by Doina Chiacu)