Government Relations and Policy
Reports from the Gulf
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They’re Angry
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
© Dr. Darron Collins
I splurged. It feels a bit like Martial Law here in Grand Isle, Louisiana and tent-squatting on the side of the road is frowned upon. So I holed up at the Tropical Motel and stayed dry during an intense storm that rolled across Lafourche Parish. The Tropical Motel was a ground-Ievel fishing camp before Hurricane Betsy flattened it in 1965. Now it’s raised and I begin Chapter 2 of this blog from room #8 on the top and only floor of this fine establishment.
Joey T lost his shrimpin’ job when the spill killed the shrimpin industry
© Dr. Darron Collins
Last week I talked a lot about the overwhelming sense of anxiety that seemed to blanket the Gulf from Dauphin Island, Alabama to Venice, Louisiana. The tenor has shifted dramatically over the weekend. Although it’s an obvious generalization, people aren’t worried anymore. They’re angry. They’re angry at what looks like ineptitude by both the US government and BP. They’re angry that dolphins and brown pelicans are washing up dead on their shores. They’re angry that hundreds of thousands of tons and millions of dollars of shrimp and other marine resources aren’t moving through the economic engines.
I’m here now for a second tour because this week is something like D-day for the Deepwater Horizon spill and the implications for drilling in the Arctic: the oil has made landfall, BP will try its widely publicized “top kill” procedure to stop the flow of oil and the Department of the Interior will release its report on the Deepwater Horizon spill and its plans for future regulation of the industry. Chapter 2 of this blog will cover those events and will also explore how the spill may touch the lives of marine mammals and other inhabitants of deeper waters.
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According to my Google Earth ruler, Grand Isle is 35 miles due west of Venice. A small outboard on a calm day can get you there in just about 45 minutes. But to drive means threading your way over 185 miles of road and bridge through a maze of canals and bayous and will take every minute of four hours.
I arrived with what must have been luck bulging from my pockets because a completely random left turn off the main drag brought me to the Dean Blanchard Seafood Company. DBS is the most productive shrimp shed in the entire state.
“We’d normally be pulling 2-300,000 pounds of shrimp through this shed every DAY this time of year,” the deck boss told me. “Today? Zero. So, yes, I can get you on a boat, but it won’t be no shrimpin’ boat ‘cause you need a HAZMAT certificate to get on one of those. But Joey T can take you.”
Joey T’s left leg had to be amputated after a fishing accident. He lost his right leg a year later in a car accident.
“I’ve worked 30 years for this company, but being disabled, I was the first to be let go when the spill killed the shrimpin’. But they let me take folks out in this flat bottom. If you want, you can set my wheelchair up in the bow and get more comfortable.”
I stayed in the back and Joey T swung us around and headed for Bird Island just north of Grand Isle in the protected waters Bay des Llettes. I felt sick. Not from the chop or the smell of oil but from having to ask Joey to take me to see the oil and having him find it within minutes. It coated the orange and yellow boom and where there was no boom it coated the marsh grass. It floated on the surface in thick orange pustules. I’ve tried to maintain a sort of objectivity in this blog to this point, but this trip made the hair stand up on the back of my neck; through repulsion, not through inspiration.
Oil covered boom’s
© Dr. Darron Collins
Hundreds of shrimp boats trawled for oil with orange and yellow boom. Those mysterious white bags from last week? That’s what they use to collect the soiled boom. Trawlers leave their nets at the dock and drag boom through the surface oil. Once a fair amount has collected on the booms, they stuff them in oversized white trash bags and start the process all over.
Oil covered marsh grass
© Dr. Darron Collins
I’m a far cry from a cleanup specialist, but the whole thing seemed ill conceived. Locals have come up with scads of ingenious ideas – like using hay and other straws to soak up the oil – that seem far superior to what I saw today. But the whole cleanup process feels like a bureaucratic worst-case-scenario stifling any kind of creativity emerging from the small and local. This is a topic I’ll touch on a bit more tomorrow as it’s something really driving that emotional shift from anxiety to anger.
Oil bubbling up on the surface of the water
© Dr. Darron Collins
But, hey, at least there were boats in the water with captains making $1500/day and deck hands making $300/day and at least Joey T was making some cash schlepping me around. And Joey T earned his money because he put me on birds like I have never seen – hundreds of pelicans and terns and gulls and egrets. Bird Island – good name.
Fortunately, the leeward side of the island had boom.
“But any kind of chop or any tidal action at all will bring oil over and under,” scoffed Joey T. “You don’t see dead birds because workers pick them up quick.”
These bags are filled with booms that are replacing the oil soaked ones that have just been collected
© Dr. Darron Collins
But the windward side was left completely unprotected and the oil stained the bright green marsh grass and the rocks lining the island. It was grotesque. I didn’t see any of this last week. I’ve never seen anything like it. Birds definitely die in these oily environs. I didn’t capture it on film, but someone from the New Orleans Time Picayune certainly did, just look at today’s cover page.
Shrimpin boat hauling oil booms
© Dr. Darron Collins
Joey T was one of the best guides I ever had. He had fished every corner of those waters for flounder, redfish and speckled trout and named and loved every tiny inlet and every bend in the land.
“February 7, 2010 was a great day. The Saints won the Super Bowl and we down here in South Louisiana were on the top of the world and looking forward to a new start after Katrina and after years of tough times. But now BP and others have dumped this on us.”
Bright green marsh stained with oil
© Dr. Darron Collins
Tomorrow I hope to get a look at how BP’s trying to plug the gash they tore through the Earth, a full mile below the water’s surface. We’ve all got our fingers crossed.
