Exclusive: Louisiana Senator Says Gulf Needs BP, Other Drilling

June 10, 2010— -- On beaches along the Gulf the fury leveled towards BP for the massive oil spill is nearly palpable, but one Louisiana senator said that as much as people may blame the oil giant for environmental and financial disasters, the area needs BP now more than ever.

"First of all, the last company that people in the Gulf want to see go bankrupt is BP because we're depending on them to clean up our environment and make our people whole," Lousiana Sen. Mary Landrieu told "Good Morning America" today in an exclusive interview. "One of the more important issues... [is] half of our families make their living fishing, the other half of our families make their living in the Gulf drilling for oil and gas that this country desperately needs."

The area's dependence on the oil industry and its population's nearly visceral anger towards the same industry over the spill has created something of a "conundrum" for the region, Landrieu said.

"We have to on the one hand fight to clean our environment and help our fishermen to do what they need to do to stay whole, but we also have to get this moratoria that the administration slapped on without a lot of economic analysis, in my view, get them to shorten it and get these deep wells drilling safely again in the Gulf," she said.

Landrieu called the government to send "SWAT"-like teams to the other 33 oil rigs in the Gulf to assure they can be operated safely and get them back to work.

"Every one of these deepwater wells employs directly hundreds of people and indirectly thousands," she said. "This is one company. This is one well. It's a terrible situation and no one is making light of it, but what I'm saying, as strongly as I can, to this president is the economic analysis is devastating to many companies, thousands of companies... And we'd better be very careful before we drive every one of these deepwater wells to Africa or India."

The current freeze in offshore drilling could could cost an additional 20,000 jobs over the next year. Over 2,000 miles of fisheries have been closed, idling thousands more workers.