Gulf Oil Spill: How to File a Claim for Losses

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Mobile, Ala. mayor Sam Jones, Alabama governor Bob Riley brief the oil spill in the gulf.

Remarkable on the one hand is the sense of American can-do; on the other, how language can gloss a nasty event. Alabama has been impacted, not fouled with oil.

Numbers impress: the specifics of the huge fleet of boats involved in the cleanup, the ubiquitous quotation of the number of millions of feet of boom deployed - a number oft repeated likely because it's impressive, yet is by now a catch phrase, spooky for its obscuring smoke, akin to Judith Miller's "weapons of mass destruction" in her reporting prior to the second gulf war.

Watch Napolitano give her press briefing at Sea Kayaking Dot Net.

How Alabama and Mobile, Ala. are responding to the spill.