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This story originally appeared in the Jackson Free Press. It was added to the Mississippi Free Press website in 2025.
Note that any opinions expressed in legacy Jackson Free Press stories do not reflect a position of the Mississippi Free Press or necessarily of its staff and board members.

BP officials said they were optimistic about a plan to place a new cap on the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA

Read DMR Director Bill Walker’s letter

Mississippi Department of Marine Resources Director Bill Walker issued a letter Friday for all Coastal municipalities to stop BP-funded oil disaster work, The Sun Herald reported today.

“Because of the diminished threat from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources is directing all recipients for Mississippi British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon Response Block Grant sub-grants to not initiate any new response projects and stop all work … effective August 9, 2010,” the letter states.

In the letter, Walker claims that while tar balls will wash ashore for several months or longer, they “will not contaminate marine waters and will not destroy our sensitive marsh habitat.”

Walker told the Sun Herald that BP would continue their own clean-up efforts.

BP work crews have also removed 300,000 feet of boom from Mississippi waters, WLOX reported yesterday.

The state received $25 million from BP for local government oil spill clean up earlier this summer.

Mississippi native Donna Ladd and partner Todd Stauffer founded the Jackson Free Press in 2002 in the capital city. The heavily awarded local newspaper did many investigations heralded across the state and nation and served as a paper of record due to its diversity, inclusion, in-depth reporting and deep connection to readers and dedication to narrative change in and about Mississippi. In 2022, the nonprofit Mississippi Free Press, founded by Ladd and JFP Associate Publisher Kimberly Griffin in 2020, purchased the journalism assets and archives of the Jackson Free Press. A Google grant through AAN Publishers enabled Newspack's integration of the JFP archives into the Mississippi Free Press website to become part of a more searchable archive of recent Mississippi history and essential journalism.