communication, ascertain and try to account for all people that were in that building or that location. so the stage now is also firming up incident command posts, who s actually running the show. this is a u.s. military base that has a combination, if i understand it correctly, or military personnel has security on the base as well as private contract. but the fbi would not basically take over this incident unless it had to do or deemed to be a terrorist incident. so then ncis or the naval component would be potentially the lead agency, although my understanding is that the washington metropolitan police may have been and may still remain in that capacity at this time. i don t have specific information on that. the idea is to slow it down, open up a line of communication, ensure that additional people are not being harmed or injured.
as many of you know, i ve actually been with response effort since two hours after the accident began some 108 days ago. i will be returning to my role as the chief operating officer for the company after today. and as part of that, i ll continue to work on our activities and what we ve learned through this response as part of the efforts to get the industry back to work in the gulf of mexico. mike has been our incident commander in houma which is one of our two very large incident command posts since i think the 27th of april, so 5 days into this accident. mike s done an extraordinary job down there in houma. and i m very, very pleased that he s agreed to take on the role of the unified area commander here in new orleans. bp coo of exploration and production, doug suttles giving us an update on the company s effort to plug the oil leak. also telling us that he s heading back to houston, perhaps another sign that things are