be where they re talking past each other. chuck, why, i just, i don t understand, there are so many skimmers that could be there, that are not there. and like you, i ve never got a straight answer. right. and again, i heard this in pensacola when we were there a couple weeks ago. that was one of the only criticisms i heard, continues every day, i m flooded with e-mails with the questions. i m going to put this mississippi paper up yet again. in mississippi they re asking the same question, there s been such a focus on the leak, but you can do an awful lot of mitigation by skimming this oil up. you ve got people going out buying shop vacs from walmart when you ve got dutch skimmers that can suck so much of this stuff off the surface. why don t we have a straight answer from thad allen or the white house on this issue? like i said, when i ve asked when we ve asked the question, they re sort of, you get pieces of an answer. and at the time, you think, okay, i get that response,
coast that has an endless supply of this. you know, brian, and thanks so much for being there. it has been devastating before the oil came, now that it s there, because tourism is what drives that city, and drives that area from memorial day to labor day, and this year is a complete wash. unfortunately, let me ask you, when we were down there, not a lot of hostility toward the federal government. not as much as you were hearing over in louisiana. but the one thing that everybody in my hometown kept saying is, where are the skimmers? why aren t they bringing more skimmers here? and that s something that every day i get e-mails from my friends in pensacola talking about dutch skimmers, and skimmers across are you hearing that down there? and what is the answer? why aren t they trying to skim that oil off more aggressively before it hits the beaches? there s no good answer that we re getting.
skimming part of it. or you ll say, well, it s under the water, the plumes are this way, they re moving in all sorts of different directions and we re focused on wore iing about the coastline and worrying about so you see what i mean? so you get you get an answer. you get a substantive answer and i think you do find out that, essentially, you start to wonder, okay, maybe there s just only so many thingsthat can be done at one time. i mean, that i guess is the explanation you re essentially getting. well, we can do the oil spill, the coastline. we get the skimmers there. they get on top of each other. i ve heard that explanation, that you sometimes can have too many people stepping on each other. i don t know. you get that, too. but it s a big, big ocean. a big, big gulf. they re talking past each other. i don t think we ve had an adequate answer to our question. it s a big, big gulf and i think they could have a lot more there. really quickly, biden on his way to pensacol
that have a vacuum function here. because they re going to come after we re off the air, and they re going to do this section, the front end loader has arrived to join us here. and they re going to clean this section of beach, and i guarantee you next high tide cycle, it will be all browned up again. all right, brian williams. thank you very much. we ll be watching you live from the gulf coast tonight on nbc nightly news. thank you, brian. for all your work. we appreciate it. you know, i do, i do hear that all the time. when we came back from pensacola, we said they weren t hostile toward the president, but they were asking the same question, where are the skimmers? where are the skimmers? it s nonstop. was that the front page of the well, there are so many skimmers that could be used off the coast. so the mississippi sun herald i was just talking about it, obviously they re talking about it over in mississippi, too, there s been such a focus on the leak, but a lot of people