by Carl Safina
In mid-June, another vocabulary word hits Alabama: “mousse.” Think of it as crude oil the consistency of chocolate pudding. But remember, it’s not pudding. If you step in it, you can’t wash it off. You need some kind of solvent. If it’s just a little, you can maybe rub until you’ve gotten most of it. If it’s on clothes, throw them away. If your kids or dog track this stuff into the house, you need a new rug or maybe a new couch.
On June 14, 300 birds get coated with oil—in Utah.
Car radio: “… We’ve just been hearing from Riki Ott, author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. She was heavily involved in the Exxon Valdez disaster. If you have any questions for Riki Ott about what’s going on in the Gulf, give us a call.…”
I once met Riki Ott; I’ve been in her home, actually. She lives in Cordova, Alaska. Former salmon fisherman with a PhD. Unusual woman.
“Riki, you’ve been saying—”
“In this country, we’ve made the decision to depend on the oil industry for cleanup. We put the spiller in charge. In Norway, the government nationalizes the spill; they have the equipment, they do the cleanup. In this country, we put the irresponsible party in charge.”
“So we say, ‘You’re irresponsible, now you’re in charge—’ ”
“Right. We’ve been trying to get the workers respirators. Something as simple as respirators. We need federal air-quality monitoring. Because if we rely on BP’s monitoring, it will end up where Exxon’s air-monitoring data ended up: disappeared—sealed into court records until 2023.”
“You were saying earlier that there’s some trouble with just getting to the sites.”
“The oil companies learned a heck of a lot more than the citizens in the wake of the Exxon Valdez. And what the oil companies learned is this: control the images. No cameras. No evidence. No problem—right?”
A royal tern and a brown pelican watch Captain Cody McCurdy pull the Gray Ghost from its pilings at Orange Beach, Alabama. Tommy Gillespie, mate, wears old tattoos on weather-beaten arms, a Confederate bandanna, two packs of cigarettes in his T-shirt. Fishermen. Until last week or so.
“I don’t see a way out,” Cody says, but he means it literally.
The marine police are enclosing the inlet with boom. Various boats stand by in case they’re needed to deploy more boom. There’s not enough for all to do. The Oil inflicts a certain aimlessness.
All boats, many of them recreational boats, are now “workboats.” BP’s money flows like oil. BP’s managers can’t turn it off, either, or they’ll trigger another eruption: people’s anger. They know that to keep people Busy and Paid—no matter how useless the errand—serves their bigger purpose: to quell, to calm, to keep the masses anything but idle. The people are Being Pacified. This busywork is theater. And to that extent, BP is now the Gulf’s biggest patron of the arts. The obvious calculation: paying for theater to suppress rage is well worth it.
The folks on the boats don’t see themselves as being manipulated. They are desperate for the income, and it’s enough that they’re getting what they’ve Been Promised. They can’t afford to look behind that curtain. Many feel—deeply—that they are defending their home waters and wetlands, defending the most important and meaningful thing in their lives.
While we wait to see if we can get out of here, I notice that everyone aboard all the other boats wears a silly little orange life jacket, the uniform of Being Paid, even in water calm enough to reflect one’s tightening anger. Most professional fishermen have probably never in their lives worn a life jacket on a boat. But of course BP wants to ensure safety on the job. Unlike while drilling in mile-deep water amid risks galore.
Even ashore, I see fishermen walking the docks—their own docks—in their little orange life jackets. Part of how Being Paid wipes away their autonomy, their adulthood, their discretion, their individuality; infantilizes them.
Fishermen are famously talkative, but now the vest wearers “have no comment.” I pity their sorry slavery. But I can afford my anger; I can go home.
We are the only boat on the water not drawing a BP check. We wear no orange vests; we have signed no waivers. I can abstain indefinitely. My companions, their options narrowed to the Breaking Point, can’t. They’re going to lose their bet that the gusher will end soon enough for them to salvage their sense of self. They just got their hazmat training and say they’re hoping to start working the oil cleanup response soon.
Can’t blame ’em; everyone’s under Big Pressure to make a day’s pay.
On the tide in the pass: lumps of oil.
Basic Problem: The marine police, blue lights flashing, say that if we go out, we won’t be allowed back in.
Cody says his boss knows the cops. His boss makes some calls and rings back, saying, “They aren’t letting anyone back in here. They don’t know why.”
A well-planned, well-coordinated, well-executed plan is all that’s lacking. Speculation remains open. Reason is closed. The officious are expert at Being Petty.
Cody says screw it, we’ll go. “Open up.”
We’s takin’ our chances, betting on the unreliability of the marine police’s advice, on inconsistency, on lack of coordination. Those guys may be off their shift by the time we get back. The next guys may say something else. And maybe it’s easier to say no to a boat leaving than to one coming back? We’ll see. They all seem to be making it up as they go.
One thing’s certain: opening a line of boom to let a boat back in makes zero difference as far as the Oil is concerned. This boom is useless against it. You might as well stretch dental floss across your bathtub to hold soapy water to one side.
They lower the boom on our wake. So much effort, applied so diligently, so earnestly—and so unequal to the task at hand.
At 9:00 A.M. the sun squints my eyes. How do the locals stand such heat?
Our mission: find the oil before it finds us. Get a sense of where. How far. How heavy. Paul Revere with outboard power.
Pelicans and helicopters. Ospreys and helicopters. Royal terns and Coast Guard helicopters.
Looking back from three miles off. High-rise condos line the shore. Ugly as hell. No boats out here, just helicopters. All fishing, even catch-and-release, is closed. A fishing boat may not possess fishing gear. That’s to protect us.
Safe from fishermen, the fish must fend for themselves in the dispersant-and-oil seawater. In the low-oxygen end of the pool. For them it’s always either frying pan or fire.
We head to a great fishing spot fifteen miles from shore. Rumors are: someone saw dead fish at the surface there. We are fishing for rumors, fishing for dead fish.
There’s enough wind for a light chop, but the water is calm. Too calm. A bit slick. An ocean normally shows many natural slicks, caused by the bodily oils from schools of fishes, by water of different densities—nothing to do with petroleum. I ask Cody if he thinks these slicks are natural. He says, “What slicks?” I point.
“Naw, this is just—” He waves it away.
From the back of the boat Tommy yells, “A lot of oil here.”
We’re suddenly sliding past coin-sized oil blobs. By the thousands.
Then, none.
Schools of tuna-cousins called little tunny shred the surface chasing small-fish prey. A couple of porpoises, far off. Blue sky. Blue-green sea. A light whiff of oil. Not as bad as I’ve heard tell.
When I ask Cody where he fishes—fished—for tuna and marlin, he points left and says seventy to ninety miles thataway. The big fishes’ address is the names of three oil rigs way out there. The rigs float on half a mile of water. The fish like rigs. “When them things light up at night, it’s like a city. Them lights draw the fish like crazy.” Natural is long gone. “It’s a lotta fun out there at night,” Cody says. We remember fun.
Tommy was born here. Cody, from Tennessee, came for the fishing.
Tommy shrimped for twenty-five years. “Hard work, the open Gulf is. You’re up three days str
aight, takin’ heads off shrimp. You’re just sittin’ there poppin’ heads, packin’ anywheres from ten to twenty boxes a day.” A box is one hundred pounds. How many shrimp? “Depends on what sizes you’re catchin’. You get anywhere from forty-fifties to ten-fifteens. That’s how many to make a pound.” About the Oil: “I ain’t no scientist or anything like that, but I don’t think it’s gonna be okay in a year. It’ll be years, prob’ly. That’s just my opinion. It’ll be parked a long time there.”
“That’s too scary to think about,” Cody says. “I depend on these coming two months for a large portion of my living.”
Let’s reminisce: “Best snapper fishin’ in the world, right off our coast,” Cody proudly crows. “Red snapper’s our bread and butter. They average five to ten pounds. We also catch vermillion snapper, triggerfish, grouper, amberjack—”
Enough reminiscing. What does he think of the booms and stuff? “A waste of time.”
Our boat rocks and growls forward. Our boat is slow and loud. Its noise helps cancel my thoughts. A good thing here, not thinking is. Not thinking about how much I always loved being at sea.
Cody spots a loggerhead turtle that seems fine. It dives. A helicopter passes.
Cody says that a few days ago, there was a slick here that ran for miles. Not here now. It’s a stealthy adversary.
Our boat scratches the sea, and on the breeze a whiff of hydrocarbons. Scratch and sniff. Twenty miles into the Gulf we enter a wide mosaic of mazelike slicks freckled with blobs of crude. In the beating heat of the sun, each blob bleeds its own mini-slick into the overall sheen, like pats of butter melting in a skillet.
Under that buttery petroleum coating I am surprised to see small living fishes. I am surprised to see fish alive in the ocean. A few flyingfish leap through the oil. I wonder how long they can last. Surely they ingest it. Surely their gills are getting gummed. More little tunny chase the small fish in a froth of white explosions that slice the rainbow sheen to ribbons. Life as always, the eternal sea, now with a twist: Can it last, can it stand it? I can’t.
Cody says last week, seven miles from shore, he saw oil blobs the size of cars. He was out for opening day of a fifty-seven-day red snapper season. It lasted two days before the government closed the waters.
Heavy lines of crude like ten-foot anacondas, like cobras with hoods spread, for miles now. And snake oil on the breeze.
Cody says, “It was just an accident. You know, we gotta have that oil. It’s a necessary evil.”
LATE JUNE
In a rather extraordinary breaking of ranks during a congressional hearing on June 15, oil executives distance themselves from BP. “We would not have drilled the well the way they did,” says ExxonMobil’s CEO. Chevron’s chief says, “It certainly appears that not all the standards that we would recommend or that we would employ were in place.” Shell’s CEO: “It’s not a well that we would have drilled in that mechanical setup.” In a seemingly sincere apology, BP’s chairman says, “This tragic accident should never have happened.” Then he manages to offend everyone in the Gulf region by adding, “We care about the small people.”
And all across the Gulf, tongues flicker with phrases like “They’re no greater than us,” “We don’t bow down to them,” and “We’re human beings.”
Big People, small people. How sad.
On June 16, a new and improved containment system hooked directly into the blowout preventer begins carrying 5,000 to 10,000 additional barrels per day to another vessel called the Q4000, which has no storage capacity and wastefully burns off all that oil and gas. By late June they’re either taking or flaring off as much as 25,000 barrels of oil daily. But plenty of oil continues billowing into the sea throughout all this. A third vessel, the Helix Producer, is scheduled for hookup to another valve on the blowout preventer by around the end of June. It can burn 25,000 barrels of oil a day. What a waste of everything. What a mess.
Tony Hayward gets a fourteen-page letter from Democratic Congressmen Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak. The letter contains nothing he hasn’t already heard and everything he won’t affirm. “Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense,” the lawmakers write. “If this is what happened,” they venture, “BP’s carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig.”
President Obama visits the Gulf for a fourth time, trying to boost tourism by eating in local restaurants. He acknowledges the tragedy and—responding to public criticism—speaks more harshly about BP.
The White House is also pressuring BP to put tens of billions of dollars into an escrow account. As one of the world’s three largest oil companies, BP generates $8 billion to $9 billion every quarter. It spends $5 billion to $6 billion a quarter. The difference—$2 to $4 billion—is its average profit every three months. Under the corporation-shielding federal liability cap, BP is legally on the hook for just $75 million—which, for perspective, is 1.25 percent of BP’s $6 billion first quarter profit this year. If Obama can simply strong-arm billions out of BP, it will be a stunning and masterful coup.
But, needless to say, many Senate Republicans are accusing Democrats and the White House of trying to exploit the oil “politically.” They also accuse Democrats of using the calamity in the Gulf to push “a job-killing climate change bill.” It’s a terrible irony that the blowout has dampened—not whetted—what little appetite there had been in the U.S. Senate to cap greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a shame, because we really need an energy bill that puts people to work in new jobs, building the energy future. Without taking from this event a propelling motivation toward new jobs for new energy, the whole blowout becomes simply a calamity, with no lessons learned, no upside, no value added in honor of the lives lost and the lives so changed. South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham had worked on a climate-change bill for months, but has pronounced it hopeless.
How much oil? The company is now funneling about 16,000 barrels a day from its leaky containment cap to a collecting ship. Federally convened experts currently estimate that the well has been spewing 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day. Every new official estimate is higher than the previous one. Asked how much he thinks is leaking, our Thadmiral demurs: “That’s the $100,000 question.” He later adds that he believes the figure is closer to the low end of the new estimate, 35,000 barrels. Of course, for weeks he’d acquiesced to 5,000. BP’s chief operating officer now says that by the end of June, BP plans to be able to capture more than 50,000 barrels a day.
Meanwhile, oil blobs and slicks coming ashore between eastern Alabama and Pensacola provoke Orange Beach’s mayor to rail, “BP isn’t giving us what we need. We’re screaming for more. We want to skim it before it gets here.”
A year after the Exxon Valdez ran aground, lawmakers passed the federal Oil Pollution Act to ensure a quick and effective response to oil spills. Every region of the country was required to have a tailored contingency plan.
But the plans amount to what the oil industry says on paper, not a demonstration of what it can do—or what might be needed. The Gulf plan considers a blowout of 240,000 barrels a day into the Gulf for at least one hundred days, far worse than the current leak—yet it declares that “no significant adverse impacts are expected” to beaches, wetlands, or wildlife.
The Minerals Management Service approved that plan. The Thadmiral now says the response has been “adequate to the assumptions in the plans.” He adds, “I think you need to go back and question the assumptions.”
Thank you, Thadmiral. That’s been tried. A 1999 Coast Guard report recommended that equipment like booms, skimmers, and absorbent materials should be increased by 25 percent. But over the next several years, lobbyists for oil companies pushed to keep the existing standards in place—and emphasized the cheaper alternative: chemical dispersants.
In August 2009, the Coast Guard effectively overruled its 1999 report, declining to require
the substantial increase in the amount of mechanical response equipment.
“BP could fire all their contractors because they’re doing absolutely nothing but destroying our marsh,” rages Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish. Weeks in, he says, “I still don’t know who’s in charge; is it BP? Is it the Coast Guard?” “The boom has been a disaster from the beginning,” Florida senator Bill Nelson tells a Senate hearing. “You have a big mess, with no command and control.” Florida’s attorney general says he’s “absolutely appalled.” The mayor of Orange Beach, Alabama, says it’s “a very discombobulated and dis-coordinated effort.”
By now people have found more than 350 dead or moribund loggerhead turtles along the Gulf Coast since the blowout began—including 20 carcasses in a single day. More than 60 have been covered in oil. Fishing gear remains suspect for some of the deaths. Meanwhile, more than 70 human Louisiana residents have reported oil-related illness to the state’s Department of Health and Hospitals.
Morning. Another day of this. I’ve driven from the Florida border, across Alabama and Mississippi, and into Louisiana, and I’m watching dawn rise in the rearview mirror. What an awful night. In the last couple of weeks our dog, Kenzie, had lost her appetite. Yet just a couple of days ago she was walking with her tail high, giving us hope that she’d get better. After I left for the Gulf she weakened rapidly, and last night she was suddenly unable to walk. Patricia called me at midnight and took her to an all-night veterinary clinic. They found a tumor in her spleen and blood in her body cavity. The vet said that operating would not guarantee success even in the short term, and partly because of Kenzie’s age, approximately thirteen, he recommended euthanasia. Pat sat with Kenzie for a while, then called me tearfully at 2:00 a.m. to say our dog was gone. I will always remember our walks on the beach and watching her run so far along the ocean, or alongside us as we biked around Lazy Point; and, more recently, helping us herd our new chickens back into their coop, and being so interested yet gentle with the infant raccoon that fell to earth in our yard. I regret that I was not home for this crisis. I regret that Patricia had to shoulder the burden alone. I regret being here. Busyness hurts relationships.
