This New York Times piece validates what Senator Vitter was saying a couple of weeks ago about the chaos of the response on the coast. I’m of the school that this thing was going to be a big mess one way or the other, but the response has clearly been poorly organized:

For much of the last two months, the focus of the response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been a mile underwater, 50 miles from shore, where successive efforts involving containment domes, “top kills” and “junk shots” have failed, and a “spillcam” shows tens of thousands of barrels of oil hemorrhaging into the gulf each day.
Closer to shore, the efforts to keep the oil away from land have not fared much better, despite a response effort involving thousands of boats, tens of thousands of workers and millions of feet of containment boom.
From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively.

More:

At the very least, these [contingency] plans, which devote pages and flow charts to command structure, were meant to have an efficient hierarchy in place as soon as a spill occurred. That structure has often been unwieldy, and to some, hardly evident at all.
“I still don’t know who’s in charge,” Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, said at the Senate hearing on Thursday, seven weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig sank. “Is it BP? Is it the Coast Guard?”