HOUMA, Louisiana—Wayde Bonvillain, who makes his living selling Louisiana’s tender soft-shell crabs, said on Wednesday that his problem is he doesn’t know yet how broke he is. How can he know, when crabs make their home thousands of feet down on the ocean floor, and now people are saying there’s spilled oil on the bottom of the sea? BP has offered him $143,000 for six years of lost earnings, he told Kenneth Feinberg, the mediator who next week will take over from BP a $20-billion fund for compensation claims from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. But, Bonvillain continued, who says the crabs are going to be back after six years? What if it’s more like 100? In that case, he said, “We’re finished. We’re dead.” Feinberg, who oversaw the compensation fund for victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and was appointed by President Barack Obama to handle the oil spill disaster claims fund, pledged a new, responsive regime that will speed up review of applications from fishermen, tourist businesses, restaurant owners and other victims and pay out emergency relief for those who can document losses. “No more beating up on BP. BP leaves the scene,” Feinberg said at a meeting here with hundreds of spill claimants. “If you file an eligible claim and document it, we guarantee to process personal claims in 48 hours. ... If you’re a business and you’ve been waiting for months in a black hole with BP, you will get an answer within seven days.” Feinberg’s pledge to fix claim delays, among the most festering issues of BP’s response to the oil spill, comes as Coast Guard officials said engineers must do more testing before a decision can be made on how and when to finally shut down the well that released an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf. Thad Allen, the federal spill response chief, said crews plan to test the pressure at the top of the well before deciding when to connect the relief well and permanently seal the wellhead. “This will be one of the final vital signs we’ll need in order to make a determination on how to go forward,” Allen told reporters. He did not give a new timeline for the final shutdown. Earlier this week, he said it was likely to be done by the end of the month. In Houma and Kenner, outside of New Orleans, Feinberg’s meetings set the stage for BP to end its oversight of damage claims and hand over responsibility to the new Gulf Coast Claims Facility, which will begin accepting new claims on Monday at offices across the region. BP has paid $368 million to individuals and businesses hurt by the oil spill, but faced widespread criticism over lost paperwork, tardy payments, misplaced checks, exhausting demands for paperwork and parades of adjustors who don’t collaborate. “I must say, BP in one sense did a pretty good job. They paid out over $300 million in claims, and they paid that separate from the $20 billion. I mean, I give BP some credit,” Feinberg said. “On the other hand, we can do better in terms of accelerating consideration of your claim, getting payments out faster, more generous...in a systematic way. You are not going to be pushed around by six, seven, eight different adjustors.” Those pledges, though, were largely for emergency relief claims—quick cash payouts intended to keep people from having homes foreclosed or businesses shut down. Harder to determine will be cases like Bonvillain’s, where the claims fund offers, in addition to the quick emergency relief checks, permanent settlements for long-term damages. But those who accept the relatively speedy payouts must pledge not to sue later. How, victims like Bonvillain demanded, can those payments be measured now, when the full extent of damage to the Gulf is still unknown? “They need money now. People are losing homes they’re losing businesses. But they can’t be in a position where they have to choose between money now and giving up claims for future damages that may not show up until the future,” said Gibson Vance, president of the national trial lawyers group, the Association for American Justice. (Los Angeles Times)

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