Person of the Week: Billy Nungesser

May 28, 2010— -- Louisiana parish leader Billy Nungesser recently captained an airboat touring the oil-soaked marshes. In a sense, he's been the captain of so much there.

"I broke down and cried, and then I called the governor and said, 'Governor, we have a problem.'"

Nungesser, a Republican, is the president of Plaquemines Parish, the first part of the Gulf Coast to get hit by oil. He reached his boiling point when he saw oil-covered pelicans dying in the fragile marshland.

"They were laying in the marsh, trying to wash their feathers off," Nungesser said. "It looked like they couldn't understand why they weren't getting clean.

That's when he knew that he would be one of the first to sound the alarm about the scope of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. His concern quickly turned to anger.

On television and in newspapers, he's criticized the federal government and BP, the company responsible for the spill.

"You lay in bed and the last thing you think about before you go to sleep is, 'What else can I do, what else can I do to save this?'" Nungesser said. "You lose it. You really do."

Nungesser looks at the surviving pelicans sitting atop the brush. The ground beneath them is stained from oil. The booms meant to stop the oil are soaked.

"The lesson learned here is we lost this battle," he said. "Now, if we're lucky, they may survive."