AUBURN — U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe criticized the Obama administration’s role in the cleanup of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico during a visit to an Auburn manufacturing plant on Wednesday.

Snowe said government officials should be overseeing British Petroleum’s cleanup efforts and working to expedite the process.

“It’s ridiculous that we’re relying on BP to make these decisions,” she said. “It’s a gap in leadership. Here we have a national catastrophe on our hands and nobody from government is interacting with (BP) on these key decisions to make sure they can hasten the disposition of these booms and make sure that they’re deployed as soon as possible.”

Snowe said she spoke to Maine-based U.S. Coast Guard officials on Tuesday and they said they need vastly more boom to help with the spill.

“We know, living in Maine, what it would mean if our coastline was devastated in this fashion,” she said. “It’s wreaking havoc for generations; it’s devastating. We’re leaving it in (BP’s) hands and so the fact is, these decisions aren’t being made in an expedited time frame or with a sense of urgency. That’s what is deeply disconcerting to me, especially because this is just going to continue to flow.”

The local plant, Packgen, has been working on producing thousands of feet of oil boom, which is used to corral oil spills like the one in the Gulf of Mexico. Company officials are still awaiting approval from BP so they can sell their product to contractors who are working on cleaning up the spill.

John Lapoint III, president of Packgen, said he had doubled his average work force last week and had 60 workers on the floor producing 35,000 feet of boom per day. But he has exhausted his resources and can’t afford to keep up production until he gets someone to buy his product. He’s back down to about 30 employees.

“We want to get our boom out there,” he said to Snowe, adding that he sent a couple of employees to the oil spill region to get a better idea about conditions on the ground. He was told contractors working to clean up the spill wanted to buy his boom, but because it’s not BP-approved, they would not get reimbursed for buying it.

That could soon change.

“Literally, as we are sitting here, we are firing off the updated specification and we hope to hear back from BP either later (on Wednesday) or (Thursday) at the latest,” Lapoint said.

He said he was told by a BP official that approval could take an hour, a day or weeks.

Lapoint told Snowe he felt the company’s response was flippant.

“It’s appalling,” she said. “They just have ruined people’s lives.”

Snowe, who is the top Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and the Coast Guard, said her office has been in touch with the White House to communicate her concerns.

She said she has written a proposal that would give the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a statutory role in reviewing deep-water drilling permitting and the comprehensive plans proposed by drilling companies to address spills.

“In this case, they underestimated the worst-case scenario and what it would take to deal with a spill at this depth,” Snowe said. She thinks more government regulation and oversight is necessary.

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