by Carl Safina
“Everybody is so stressed here. We’re just sitting here waiting and they’re not telling us anything because they don’t know,” says a Grand Isle restaurant owner who may soon be out of business. “I had four people who came yesterday crying.” A fisherman says, “My wife cried and cried over this. Just the other night she told me, ‘Thank God there isn’t a loaded gun in this house.’ ”
In Gulf Shores, Alabama, thick oil washes up at a state park, coating the white sand with a thick, red stew. “This makes me sick,” says one resident, her legs and feet streaked with crude. “I’ve gone from owning a piece of paradise to owning a toxic waste dump.” Says a fishing guide, “I don’t want to say heartbreaking, because that’s been said. It’s a nightmare. It looks like it’s going to be wave after wave of it and nobody can stop it.”
Meanwhile, dozens of oil-drenched pelicans float around Louisiana’s Grand Terre Island. People have found more than 500 tarred-and-feathered birds dead, and have rescued about 80 oiled birds and nearly 30 mammals, including dolphins. Most showed no obvious oil; maybe something else killed them. But oil ingestion and fumes could have caused this.
The sight of animals struggling in oil moves me to tears more than once. But the numbers here are small compared with the avian toll of the Exxon Valdez. After that spill, workers immediately found more than 35,000 birds; by reasonable estimates, approximately 250,000 died. That was because of the density of the oil, the temperature of the water, and the fact that coastal Alaska is home to enormous numbers of aquatic birds of whole family types that (like sea lions) don’t live in the Gulf.
That doesn’t mean the rescue efforts are going well.
“This is the worst screwed-up response I’ve ever been on,” says Rebecca Dmytryk, who has worked with oiled birds in Louisiana, California, and Ecuador, and founded a group called WildRescue. Experienced wildlife rescuers have complained that they’ve been prevented from going out to look for live oiled birds in the most likely places, sidelined, or never called in at all. A guy with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that rescuing oiled birds is a task for “our trained biologists.” But experienced rescuers complain that the job of rescue went to inexperienced government employees—fisheries biologists, firefighters—who had never touched a bird before. “I’m just at a loss for why this was allowed,” says Lee Fox of Save Our Seabirds, who has written a manual on handling oiled birds.
Jay Holcomb of the International Bird Rescue Research Center has been saving birds from oil spills for thirty years, on three continents. During the Exxon Valdez event, he oversaw the entire bird search and rescue program in Prince William Sound, the largest ever attempted, involving dozens of boats and thousands of birds. But here, that’s not good enough for the officious officials. “We’ve been assigned to take hotline calls,” he complains, “completely kept out of it.”
BP hired a four-year-old Texas company called Wildlife Response Services to oversee the rescue and rehabilitation of birds, turtles, and any other animals hurt by the spill. Its owner says Holcomb and the other wildlife rehabilitation experts “didn’t have the personnel to go out and rescue all the birds.” She says the system she set up has worked well, adding, “I don’t know why anyone would question that.”
Four months ago, she did call Lee Fox and tell her to get ready. Fox says, “I’ve never heard another word. I’m up to my nostrils drowning in frustration.” Dmytryk says she and her coworkers begged for permission to go out into the Gulf to look for sick and injured birds that were too weak to make it to shore. But they were turned down. Sharon Schmalz of Wildlife Rehab and Education in Texas, who has over twenty-five years’ experience working spills Gulf-wide, says, “We were told to stay put.” “They said for safety reasons we couldn’t do it,” Holcomb says. “There was not a lot of interest in using our expertise.”
Meanwhile, a blowout in Pennsylvania: a well blows natural gas and drilling fluid seventy-five feet into the air. It does not ignite and no one is hurt but it takes sixteen hours to control.
The government now estimates that 500,000 to 1 million gallons of crude—12,000 to 24,000 barrels—are leaking daily.
Our Thadmiral tells us, “This spill is just aggregated over a 200-mile radius around the wellbore, where it’s leaking right now, and it’s not a monolithic spill. It’s an insidious war, because it’s attacking, you know, four states one at a time, and it comes from different directions depending on the weather.” He adds with a dash of frustration, “This spill is keeping everybody hostage.”
Hostages: A BP rep tells residents gathered at a church, “We are all angry and frustrated. Feel free tonight to let me see that anger.”
Residents aren’t buying it. “ ‘Sorry’ doesn’t pay the bills,” says one. “We’re sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Sick. And tired. In Louisiana, seventy-one people suffer throat irritation, cough, shortness of breath, eye irritation, nausea, chest pain, and headaches following exposure to emulsified oil and dispersant. Most are briefly hospitalized.
The stress of anger is giving way to the hopelessness of depression. Without fishing, what’s lost is not just vocation, but also what life means, what life is, and people’s understanding of who they are. What’s lost is pride. What’s gained is fear of losing everything. What’s creeping in around the edges: The search for answers at the bottom of a bottle. The thought that suicide may end the pain.
In two weeks spanning the last week of May and the first week of June the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals counseled 749 people having symptoms that could lead to destructive behavior. Experts say the region should brace for long-term psychological strain. Are they making matters worse by announcing that?
One fisherman, stricken by the sight of fish floating dead, frets over whether he will be able to pass on his trade to his children, a thirteen-month-old son and ten-year-old daughter. His wife, who has sought counseling, says, “My husband went from a happy guy to a zombie consumed by the oil spill.” He replies, “If you’re not out there in it, you can’t comprehend what this is about. We’re going to be surrounded by it.” Says one town council member, her voice trembling, “We’re not going to be okay for a long, long time.”
HIGH JUNE
The flow BP is getting good at stopping is the flow of news. When folks at Southern Seaplane, in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, call the local Coast Guard–Federal Aviation Administration command center for routine permission to fly a photographer from the Times-Picayune over part of the oily Gulf, a BP contractor answers the phone. His swift and absolute response: Permission denied. “We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?” recalls Rhonda Panepinto, who co-owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. “The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: ‘Not allowed.’ ”
A spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration says the BP contractor who answered the phone was there because the FAA operations center is in one of BP’s buildings. “That person was not making decisions about whether aircraft are allowed to enter the airspace,” the spokeswoman spoke.
Why is the FAA in a BP building when BP is the cause, and is under criminal investigation? No other office rental spaces in the four-state region? And they’re sharing phone lines?
Across the Gulf, I as well as various photographers, journalists, filmmakers, and environmentalists trying to understand and document the spreading oil are now having real problems. We’re getting turned away from public areas affected by the oil—and being threatened with arrest—by private guards, sheriffs, cops, and the Coast Guard.
Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, planned to bring a small group of journalists with him on a trip he was taking through the Gulf on a Coast Guard vessel. The Coast Guard agreed to accommodate the reporters and photographers. At about 10:00 P.M. on the night before the trip, someone from the Department of Homeland Security called the senator’s office to say that no journalists would be allowed.
What lame
excuse did they have? “They said it was the Department of Homeland Security’s response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same ‘federal asset,’ ” said a spokesman for the senator. “No further elaboration.”
A reporter and photographer from New York’s Daily News were told by a BP contractor that they could not access a public beach on Grand Isle, Louisiana, one of the areas most heavily affected by the oil spill. The contractor summoned a local sheriff, who then told the reporter, Matthew Lysiak, that news media persons had to fill out paperwork and then be escorted by a BP official to get access to the public beach. “For the police to tell me I needed to sign paperwork with BP to go to a public beach?” Lysiak said. “It’s just irrational.”
BP is obviously a company with a lot to hide. But how it’s staged a coup of the Gulf and gained control of government—that, I don’t get.
“Our general approach throughout this response,” says yet another of the seemingly dozens of faceless BP spokesmen, “has been to allow as much access as possible to media and other parties without compromising the work we are engaged on or the safety of those to whom we give access.”
They allow? To whom they give access? How did a corporation succeed in suppressing U.S. citizens trying to see and talk about what’s going on, and why are any of our law enforcers, who should be guarding the coast against BP, so thoroughly and sickeningly capitulating, deferring, and letting themselves Be Played? Obama wanted to know “whose ass to kick”? The answer’s so blindingly obvious. How is that even a question?
When CBS News reports that one of its news crews was threatened with arrest for trying to film a public beach where oil had washed ashore, the Coast Guard says it is disappointed to learn of the incident.
Signs announce imaginary lines, but the real landscape changes slowly from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama to Florida. And so does the light. Green fields. Blue skies. Black cows. Red barns. Sentinal mockingbirds. Amber waves of wheat. Hay for sale while the sun shines. Modest houses with wide lawns and the shade of big trees. Chairs on porches. Mimosas in bloom. Spreading palms, tall pines. The proudness of corn. A few unlucky armadillos. The Roadkill Cafe, the Elberta Social Club. Antiques and collectibles. Live bait and crawfish at the hardware store and at the grocery store. At the garden store: “Ten Percent Off All Firearms.” The tank guarding the veterans memorial. Signs directing our attention to pizza, the control of pests, and eternal salvation. A Baptist church advises, “Do Your Work Today As If There Is No Tomorrow.” Dopey advice; all work is about tomorrow. Tomorrow, opposable thumbs, and the ability to ignite oil are what make us human.
But for fishermen and anyone dependent on tourist dollars, perhaps yes, now’s not a time to wreck your head over tomorrow; too many unknowns. Take it one day at a time. On the other hand, to get you through this, the most important thing is to keep imagining a better tomorrow. Another church and a sign a bit more to the point: “Forgive Us, Lord.” That covers the multitude of sins, serves up the Big Prayer.
Nighthawks and chimney swifts. Small bridges. Their rivers and bays lined with emerald summer. Troops of pelicans flying west. I’ve come from the west. West is where the Oil is coming from. It dominates even my sense of direction. Coats my mental compass.
The scenery, changing slowly. Tractors for sale. Tractors at work. Signs advertise the services of those who weld, those who build docks. “Deep Sea Fishing: 4.4 miles.” Close by but already in the past. A man named Twinkle is running for office.
One of life’s simple pleasures: driving with the radio on. I hear that the wife of one of the eleven killed says BP will never feel the pain the survivors feel. But how could it? It is not a person. Where a heart would be, it has only money.
The Supreme Court disagrees with me; five of its justices say a corporation is a person. Does a corporation have a belly button? That’s one’s passport down through ages, a living link in the one eternal chain of being, life to life. BP is no person. Person: a two-legged primate with thoughts, feelings, blood ties, dreams. Not something for courts to trifle with. Not, in truth, subject to their opinion. A sacred matter, of the greatest of mysteries.
First glimpse of Mobile, Alabama, includes too many oil rigs to count easily. One reason I’ve so seldom returned to the Gulf is the rigs’ visual blight. They’re the wide horizon’s piercing reminder of oil’s stranglehold on us, our cheap-energy addiction. The rigs flare their gas from their long arms like Lady Liberty’s torches. We are all victims, all perpetrators. What goes around comes apart.
The shorelines of Mobile Bay are confettied with orange boom. It’s hot. The sun raises an ocean haze. Right now here, the Oil is mostly an idea, the coming thing. The booms await it. The rigs foreshadow it.
On the corner, the BP station. I still have half a tank.
Scientists continue to plague us with pesky reports of massive plumes of undersea oil. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researchers working aboard the National Science Foundation’s ship Endeavor beginning in mid-June confirm the presence of drifting oil deep below the surface. Using 5,800 separate measurements, they find a hydrocarbon plume over a mile wide, over twenty miles long, hundreds of feet thick, detectable down to 3,300 feet, and extending itself at a little over four miles a day.
People envision a river of oil. But Woods Hole chemist Chris Reddy will explain, “The plume was not a river of Hershey’s syrup.” The water samples collected at these depths had no odor of oil and were clear. The dilute oil was detected by instruments. “But that’s not to say it isn’t harmful to the environment,” he adds.
And in perhaps the world’s first case of plume envy—or whatever you’d call it—the University of Georgia’s Samantha Joye says her plume is bigger than theirs; she says Woods Hole’s plume “doesn’t hold a candle to the plume we saw.”
Whether like syrup or seltzer, the thought of massive plumes of undersea oil is disturbing. So from what corner shall come the next volley of fresh reassurance? National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officials call the academic scientists’ announcements of their discovery of plumes “misleading, premature and, in some cases, inaccurate.”
Note: “in some cases.” Interesting phrase. An exception big enough for a wiggly pig. Means—it would seem—that “in some other cases” it is accurate to say there are giant undersea plumes of hydrocarbons now drifting in the Gulf.
NOAA says oxygen depletion in the waters surrounding plumes is not “a source of concern at this time.” NOAA says critics blaming dispersants for the plumes have “no information” to back their claims up. NOAA administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, whom Newsweek—in a carefully crafted phrase—calls “a respected oceanographer when President Obama tapped her to lead the agency,” says there are no “plumes,” only “anomalies.”
Now, wait a minute. Don’t tell me “no information.” Obviously, the oil is coming out of the seafloor. The dispersants are designed to keep it underwater. It’s coming from beneath the surface. It’s being dispersed beneath the surface. And when it surfaces, it’s being hit with dispersants that dissolve it to make it sink. Beneath the surface is where a lot of it is—obviously.
I’ve known Jane Lubchenco for close to twenty years, and in the late 1990s I spent a lot of time with her when we were part of a team traveling to various cities to tell people about how the ocean is changing. I respect her very much. But there comes a time when political pressures cause a person to try to distinguish between “plumes” and “anomalies,” though those are two words for the same thing. One can parse language into droplets so small that the facts dissolve to difficult-to-detect dilutions; one can disperse truth itself. People get confused, get the wrong impression. Sometimes that’s the goal. So it’s better to stand with the truth. Political situations come and go. What begins and what ends, and what follows a person forever after, is the truth. Obviously the oil is in the water. It comes from somewhere, it has to go somewhere, and the water is where.
A scie
ntist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory says that even without dispersants, oil originating with such force at this depth and pressure breaks into zillions of droplets that stay suspended in the water.
Not as visually shocking as dead pelicans, but much more basic, is the plight of the minute clouds of life at the base of the food chain. The things that grow the fish that magically become leaping dolphins and plunging seabirds—tiny things living deep, almost beyond the reach of human acknowledgment—are probably having a pretty hard time right now across large swaths of the Gulf.
The deep sea contains a galaxy of little animals—everything from planktonic beasts to jellies to billions of small fishes called lantern-fishes (myctophids). They all live in a layer of life that twice a day performs the greatest animal migration on Earth, from the darkness of deep daytime waters to the darkness of shallow nighttime waters, and back again. This zone of life is like a flying carpet throughout an astonishingly large portion of the world ocean. On a moving ship, it is extraordinary to watch it on the sonar as it slowly rises and dives over the course of the day, even while your ship is covering hundreds of miles. Proponents of dispersants contend that by dissolving the oil, microbes can more easily feed on it. But before that happens, these billowing toxic clouds will roll through this zone of life in the Gulf, where the damage will likely never really be assessed.
