I will be filing some legislation tomorrow that I will announce later that would ensure that NOAA and the Coast Guard have the tools to prepare and respond for the next marine oil spill.

As we are researching in the future to try to determine the health of the Gulf as a result of this four to five million barrels of oil spill, what are we going to look for other than the obvious, the food chain, the critters?

I will just say in closing that we had to raise cain to get the pictures 5,000 feet below.

Were we not lucky that the loop current did not catch the oil and take it south and around the Florida Keys and up the southeast coast of Florida?

This matter is very personal to me. Those of us on the Gulf lived through this.

We owe a lot to this public service, and we need to modernize some of their equipment.

This is truly an issue of capacity.

The key to our future operational success is stable and predictable funding.

They are the responsible party. They are accountable for removing that oil.

And to think that that's who we would be putting into the right seat of the cockpit on a regional airline does not build confidence, in the traveling public.

The offshore patrol cutter is my number one recapitalization priority.

The memories still linger, 5 years ago, Deepwater Horizon.