An open letter to BP  at Unified Command:

Gentlemen:

At the monthly meeting of the Baldwin County Fire Chiefs Association a motion was passed to censure BP for choosing to keep our local fire departments uninformed and uninvolved with its overall handling of oil spill issues in Baldwin County.

 There are 36 independent fire departments in this association, each responsible for fire and emergencies within their legally defined fire districts. These departments protect Baldwin County, Alabama, the largest county in the United States of America east of the Mississippi River.  

We are very disturbed at the total lack of information and absolute lack of response for information from the BP and the Unified Command.

We responded to BP’s request by Henry de La Garza and Glenn Johnson to meet with us, and planned a special meeting at their direction, only to have it canceled with very short notice. When I protested this, we were reassigned to a newly hired, lower-level PR person, Ashley Babb. She promised us we would now be kept up to date and that she would attend our next monthly meeting 10 days in the future. We haven’t heard from her since. That meeting was last week and she did not attend.

We offered our stations for training, staging and logistical use. Ignored.

We requested MSDS and HAZMAT training info. No response. We requested operational info in Lillian with no response. We requested info on the Weeks Bay operation. Again, no response.

Contractors and employees have brought in recently hired people from out of state with no assessment of local response services available.

Upon our request for a personal contact, we were referred to a website contact number which either did not work or had no information.

It appears that there is a policy to keep local professionals as far from this disaster response as possible.

Interestingly, our services are free or at most, cost reimbursable. You have chosen to use commercial operations at exorbitant costs.

The fire service in this county is extremely well equipped and trained. Fire departments are in reality emergency departments. We have people who are experts in all types of emergency response. We are highly trained in National Incident Management System and HAZMAT and work well together with mutual aid in multi-district operations.

To be kept totally out of the loop in this disaster makes no sense. Our citizens have come to expect a high level of response from us. With us having no information for them we are not meeting their needs. They deserve better than they are getting.

To keep us uninvolved and uninformed is irresponsible and unacceptable.

This in no way is to reflect upon our Baldwin County Emergency Management Agency as we feel they too are purposely being kept on the sidelines. We have total confidence in this agency.

We want the following items to be addressed immediately:

We sympathize with you on the complexity and enormity of this disaster. However this is OUR state, OUR county, OUR districts and OUR waterways and we will not stand idly.

Be advised that this letter is being widely distributed.

Your reply and positive response is expected.

Yours in service,

Gib Hixon, president of the Baldwin County Fire Chiefs Association

Fire Chief, Fish River Marlow Fire & Rescue