by Carl Safina
Finally, finally, finally, after about a week, the giant skimmer ship is allowed to do its thing.
It doesn’t work.
On the final day of June, oil is scoring a touchdown on the Mississippi coast. On the radio, Governor Barbour says they had a great plan six weeks ago that isn’t working very well now. Not enough skimmers, not enough equipment.
He is asked by the radio host whether this tests the philosophy that he and many Republicans champion: smaller government, less regulation, more freedom for industry. “The idea that more regulation is good is, I believe, a very suspect idea,” Barbour answers. “In the case of this well, I think that if existing regulations were followed, it wouldn’t have blown out. I think if there was somebody from Minerals Management Service on the rig that day making sure the regulations were properly followed, that would’ve made a difference. Now I think every oil company in the world is looking and thinking they wouldn’t want to be paying $100 million a day like BP. That’s how I believe the market system works.”
And why wasn’t the “Minerals Management Service on the rig that day making sure the regulations were properly followed”? Precisely because of people who champion smaller government, less regulation, more freedom for industry. Let’s face it: most people who think they’re “conservatives” these days are mainly phonies, radical front people for big business dedicated to removing public safeguards and safeguarding private greed. The missed point about whether government should be small or big, strong or weak is: it’s our government. It should be accountable to us. Real conservatives would tell corporations to go to hell when they try to contribute campaign money, when they work to influence elections. By allowing themselves to become obsessed with the demand for “small government,” “deregulation,” and taxes, in effect they mostly represent big corporations that pocket profits and dump their risks and the costs onto other people. Some of the other people are too angry to realize that there’s a shell game going on. The rest of us are simply too comfortable. “The best lack all conviction,” Yeats said, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
It’s hot. And because it’s so hot, BPs beachside cleanup workers—30,000 of them—are told to work for twenty minutes and rest for forty. For $12 an hour, the work is sweaty and uncomfortable, but not overly taxing. To save their backs, workers are not allowed to put more than ten pounds of oily sand in a bag. That’s not much sand. Hundreds and hundreds of plastic bags, each with its little dollop of the besmirched beach—where are the hundreds of thousands of plastic bags, oily absorbent materials, and hundreds of tons of oily trash going? Landfills. Mixed with regular trash. Because it has to go somewhere. Don’t worry: BP says that “tests” have shown that the material is not hazardous.
Someone on the radio is saying, “… To get near oil on the beaches, people need special training. But BP has troops … thousands of workers, who have received such training.…”
They make oil sound so special. It’s oil. Gasoline’s more dangerous. Ever fill your car’s tank? Ever change your car’s oil? You don’t need special training. For anyone with a pair of old sneakers and a shovel, it should be no Big Problem to pick up a little oil if they want to.
Out on the water, some of the workforce sits idle. About 2,000 vessels are supposedly involved in the cleanup efforts. But many captains sit aboard their boats, awaiting instructions. For this, BP pays them, say, $1,000 a day (the fee varies with the size of the boat). Meanwhile, thousands of people from around the country want to drop everything and come help. But there’s nothing for them to do. And their calls don’t get returned. Forty-four nations have offered to help. For the most part, their calls don’t get returned, either.
“The clean-up effort has not been perfect,” BP’s new American spokesmouth, Bob Dudley, acknowledges. But, seeking to assuage fears in the only language known to multinational corporate brains, he adds that BP remains a “very strong company in terms of its cash flow.”
Science bulletin: an astonishing congregation of dozens of the world’s largest fish—whale sharks—have been discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. One aerial photograph showed about ninety of the behemoths together, about sixty miles from the oil. “It blew my mind,” says the University of Southern Mississippi’s Eric Hoffmayer. The bad news? You guessed it: some of them have also been seen in heavy oil. They eat tiny creatures that they strain from the water. Their feeding technique includes skimming the surface and moving almost 160,000 gallons of seawater through their mouths and gills per hour as they feed on tiny fish and plankton. Watching them, you get the impression that their feeding method is the worst possible technique for surviving an oil slick. “This spill’s impact came at the worst possible time and in the worst possible location for whale sharks,” Hoffmayer says. “Taking mouthfuls of thick oil is not conducive to them surviving.”
Science bulletin: scientists with the University of Southern Mississippi and Tulane University report finding petroleum droplets on the fins of small larval fish. “Their fins were encased in oil,” says Harriet Perry, director of the Center for Fisheries Research and Development at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory. “This is one route up the food ladder,” she speculates. “Small fish will eat the larvae, bigger fish—you know how it goes.”
Laboratory studies and field experience with wildlife shows that oil can cause skin sores, liver damage, eye and olfactory irritation, reduced growth, reduced hatching success, fin disintegration, and, of course, death. In heavily oiled areas, some animals can move away. Fish eggs and larvae cannot move. The Argo Merchant oil spill killed 20 percent of nearby cod eggs and almost half of pollock eggs. The Torrey Canyon killed 90 percent of the eggs of a fish species called pilchard. Similar death rates followed the Exxon Valdez. Other species seem far less affected. Of oiled fish eggs that hatched, larvae often had deformed jaws, spinal problems, heart problems, nerve problems, and behavioral problems.
However, under normal circumstances in clean water, natural mortality rates of eggs and larvae are so colossal, and such a tiny fraction survive to adulthood, that even the near-total destruction of one whole year-class of fish eggs by an oil spill might have a difficult-to-notice effect on adult populations.
In Prince William Sound during the months following the Exxon Valdez spill, herring eggs and larvae in oiled areas died at twice the rate they did in unoiled areas. Larval growth rates were half those measured in other North Pacific populations. Herring larvae also suffered malformations, genetic damage, and grew slower than ever recorded anywhere else. Those problems were gone by the following year.
But it’s not that simple. Different things get hurt at different rates for differing periods of time. Oil that works its way into sediments and under boulders remains toxic and available to living things. In Prince William Sound after Exxon Valdez, oil hiding beneath mussel beds continued to find its way into the region’s animals and their food web. For years, ducks and otters suffered chronic exposure to oil. For at least four years, the eggs of pink salmon, which spawn in the lower reaches of streams, near seawater, failed at abnormally high rates. Young sea otters born for several years after the spill survived at unusually low rates. After sea otters had received protection from hunting for their fur, their population increased 10 percent annually. But after the oil spill, they recovered at only 4 percent per year. In heavily oiled areas, their numbers did not increase at all for at least a dozen years. Shellfish—which sea otters (and people) eat—concentrate oil hydrocarbons quickly and metabolize them slowly. For at least several years, black oystercatchers fed their chicks more mussels but achieved less growth than normal. Harlequin ducks (probably the world’s most exquisitely beautiful sea duck, which is saying something) for many years suffered low weight as their bodies tried to fight the toxic effects of the petroleum hydrocarbons they were getting in their food. In parts of Prince William Sound, they died at rates of 20 percent annually for over a decade. A study published in the April 2010 issue of Environmental Toxic
ology and Chemistry finds that harlequin ducks are still ingesting Exxon Valdez oil. Biopsy samples show their livers containing the enzymes they produce when their body is wrestling with oil.
Everywhere I’ve been, there’s boom. Boom along the shore, boom under bridges, boom in roadside canals. Boom, boom, boom. You can’t avoid it. And almost everywhere I’ve been, there’s been the chronic low-level hassling of camera-toting types like me, by sheriffs and orange-vested private guards on public roads and alongside waterways.
And today, the Coast Guard takes the situation one giant step in the wrong direction. They make it a crime in southern Louisiana to get within seventy feet of boom. You risk a $40,000 fine. And if you do it “willfully,” that’s now a felony.
A felony? Impossible. Can the Coast Guard make a law? But it’s true. Here is their press release:
June 30, 2010 16:51:40 CST
Coast Guard establishes 20-meter safety zone around all Deepwater Horizon protective boom operations taking place in Southeast Louisiana.
The Captains of the Port for Morgan City, La., New Orleans, La., and Mobile, Ala., under the authority of the Ports and Waterways Safety Act, has [sic] established a 20-meter safety zone surrounding all Deepwater Horizon booming operations and oil response efforts.
Vessels must not come within 20 meters of booming operations, boom, or oil spill response operations under penalty of law.…
Violation of a safety zone can result in up to a $40,000 civil penalty. Willful violations may result in a class D felony.
This, after weeks of people screaming for transparency and complaining about interference and petty bullying by people getting paid by BP. When I do a Google search with the words “media access Gulf oil,” I find plenty of other people complaining. One Web commentator says, “Never in my lifetime could I imagine that a foreign company could dictate my ability to move freely and openly in American territorial waters.”
America should be able to show that in a crisis we are at our finest, our most American. But wow. I can barely contain the rage I feel at the Coast Guard and its Thadmiral.
The highway to Venice, Louisiana, is sixty miles of levee sandwich, a corridor of road between corridors of water. Heavy shipping lanes gouged through wetlands. Dying trees in subsiding marshes. Herons. Cormorants. A least bittern; nice bird. They’re all nice. Egrets still immaculately white, offering the hope of the living even as they feel the squeeze.
Captain Jeff Wolkart is telling me, “Two weeks into the spill, we were at Pelican Island fishing under birds in about five feet of water, which is a common way of fishing this time of year. And a dolphin kept coming around. Its body was covered in that brownish oil, that tannish-colored crude. And he was trying to blow out his blowhole, and he was struggling. Porpoises scare fish, so I moved off a hundred yards. It followed. I kept doing that and it kept coming back, coming to us, hanging right alongside the boat. That’s very unusual. They’re pretty intelligent, and it seemed to want help. But eventually I had to leave.”
Dawn. Helicopters soon join the gulls. The drone of engines is as incessant as the industries of swallows that affix their nests to the I-beams of waterfront warehouses.
The media invasion is pulling away, leaving a low-level occupation. So many were they—many of them urban northerners—that the dockside burger-and-fries joint I’m in was compelled to add a “healthy platter.” BP, its contractors, its security guards, and more than a few sheriffs understand the media as spies, prying eyes for a public prone to unwieldy concern if well informed.
The watermen seem a bit severed by the constant traffic of contractor vans and trucks and the private guards. It’s not their place anymore. How are they finding the strength?
Here’s how: all the watermen are choosing to work for BP. There’s money now, work moving stuff, bringing stuff, towing stuff. Two grand a day. For now. After that, they don’t know.
Charter captains meeting: fishermen—former fishermen, for now. A young man, twenties, asks, “Where will I take my kids fishing?” He has no kids yet. I hope he becomes CEO of an oil company. They could use his concern for kids.
All these guys know what it was like a couple of months ago, before the Big Problem. Few know, as the head of this association knows, what it was like way back. “You young guys, you’ll never see it like me and Billy saw it,” he says. I follow his eyes to where Billy’s gray hair flows from under a baseball cap. “The place is a small fraction of what it was. It’s infinitesimal compared to what it was.”
The place is about water, cane, tides, mud, crabs, fish, birds, shrimp. All the pesky things an engineer overlooks while making “America’s Wetland” bear the tasks of shipping, industrial access, flood control.
This isn’t just a working coast. It’s an overworked coast. Watermen feel stalked by disintegrating marshes. And everywhere the towering hardware of oil and gas prickles the horizon and brings down the sky. Henry Ford first used biodiesel. Standard Oil lobbied for Prohibition so there’d be no ethanol available. Ford was forced to switch to petroleum gasoline.
Outside, the oil complex confronts the eye with pipes, stacks, tubes. “It’s so ugly,” my companion says, “but it’s jobs.” A moment later she adds, “Ports, rigs; the oil is just the face of how the whole place—nature and people—have been so disrespected.”
Wherever you turned, the Oil shadowed.
Suddenly, the Gulf seemed to betray all prior promises.
In the beautiful blue Gulf, the blowout meant a massive brownout.
For weeks, much of the Gulf resembled abstract oil paintings.
Directly over the blown-out well, crews drilled relief wells while one rig collected oil and flared gas.
Oil drifting inexorably onto undefended Louisiana shoreline.
Intimate, intertwined relationships create human reliance
on the Mississippi Delta marshes.
The marshes have for decades suffered death by a thousand cuts and, oil aside, they still do.
Booms, booms, booms.
Workers collect sand splattered with oil while a few beachgoers remain, determined to enjoy themselves.
Booms rendered useless by a little wave action.
Booms could not prevent birds from flying to oiled areas.
Booms towed by shrimp boats seemed to leave as much oil behind as there was ahead.
Oil-splattered beaches kept tourists away in droves.
On Dauphin Island, Alabama, wetlands were destroyed to mine sand to build oceanfront berms.
Were the multimillion-dollar berms really to hold back oil, or were they a desperate attempt to shield real estate from the next big hurricane?
A sea turtle nest. Protected?
Around the taped-off turtle nest, all beach-holding vegetation was destroyed for berms that would likely wash away, and any turtles that hatched had a near-zero chance of detecting the direction to the sea.
Happy Independence Day
By the dawn’s oily light, kids had slick fun on the Fourth of July.
Spontaneous art expressing roadside rage.
One Mississippi River Delta resident’s opinion.
On a private lawn in Grand Isle, Louisiana, grief.
On a southern Louisiana intersection, despair during a summer of anguish.
LIKE A THOUSAND JULYS
By the beginning of July, this blowout achieves peerdom, in sheer volume, with the Ixtoc disaster. That had been the largest accidental release of oil ever. Until now. Something like 140 million Macondo gallons have hemorrhaged into the Gulf.
Way back on May 26, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered BP to cut dispersant use roughly 75 percent from the maximum. But the maximum was 70,000 gallons in one day. The EPA now says it wants to keep dispersant use down to 18,000 gallons per day. CNN reports that BP is still averaging about 23,250 gallons. Such are the games.
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said weeks ago that she was “dissatisfied with BP’s response.” Her agency set a deadline for BP
to stop using two particular Corexit dispersant formulations (including one banned in Britain).
In mid-June BP announced that one, Corexit 9527, is “no longer in use in the Gulf.” The manufacturer will say that the alternative, Corexit 9500, does not include the 2-butoxyethanol linked to the long-term health problems of Exxon Valdez cleanup workers.
BP seems to get away with shrugging its shoulders. When it only partially complies, there are no fines and no one goes to jail. I know what would happen to, say, me if I took a boat into the Gulf and radioed the Coast Guard to announce that I was about to dump one barrel of chemical dispersant.
And at the beginning of July, more than two months into the blowout, the Environmental Protection Agency comes out with new findings on the dispersants: They’re “practically non-toxic.”
Because of the early “not leaking; too early to say catastrophe” statements by the Coast Guard, because of the tone implied by “anomalies, not plumes,” because of the BP–Coast Guard marriage and the chronic official bullying, because the EPA seems to let BP shrug off even weak directives, because, because, because—nobody believes “them” when they say the dispersants are “practically” non-toxic. Whether they’re right or wrong is beside the point. The point is: “they” have a credibility problem; they’ve lost the people’s trust. No one is sure who to believe. There is no real source of reliable information, and people continue to believe, think, and feel a lot of things that aren’t true. But some are true. It creates confusion.
