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Oil on the Water
Breaking News and Views about the Gulf Oil Spill.
Disaster in Another Language
The Oil Spill May Hit the Gulf’s Vietnamese Community Hardest
On a seared Monday afternoon in mid-June, the fishing dock in Port Sulphur, Louisiana was disturbingly quiet. The boat slips were full, a bad sign at what should have been the height of the fishing season. The place was nearly empty of people. A group of five BP-contracted cleanup workers lazed in the shade waiting for orders from higher-ups. A couple of US Fish and Wildlife Service guys loaded up a boat with cages for capturing oil-soaked birds. It was Day 55 of the oil spill.
The only people who looked busy were the Nguyen and Vu families. Despite punishing temperatures and humidity (the heat index was above 100 degrees), they were using the fishing closure as a chance to do some boat repairs. The families had removed the trawling riggings from their boats and had the …more
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Hide and Leak
BP’s Cleanup Is More Like a Cover up. Holding the Company Accountable Will Require Digging for the Truth.
On July 15, BP managed to finally seal its broken Macondo wellhead and stop the oil that had been hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. The very next week, as I was driving up the Florida coast, locals kept pointing out to me where cleanup workers were packing up and pulling out. From Crawfordville through to Carrabelle, and Port St. Joe to Pensacola, the booms were disappearing, the crew tents folded up and removed from beaches.
The well had been capped, after all. The gusher had stopped. Game over. Everyone can go home, right?
Not even close. If all goes according to plan, the relief well should provide a more permanent fix. But that hasn’t been the …more
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Despite a flood of information about the Gulf spill, there’s very little understanding of its impacts.
Deepwater Horizon Unified CommandCleanup workers are getting little clear information about the dangers of
exposure to oil and dispersants.
After more than 100 days of disaster news stories, countless press conferences, and regular updates on government websites, we still have very little real understanding of the Deepwater Horizon blowout’s impacts – short- or long-term – on the ocean ecosystem, Gulf Coast communities, or response workers. Environmental-monitoring data released by federal agencies and BP, while copious, fails to answer the many questions prompted by reported health complaints. Compounding this dilemma is the fact that information is being actively withheld.
Here’s a reminder of what we’re grappling with: To date, more than 200 million gallons of petroleum have gushed from the ruptured well, oiling 650 miles of …more
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We Are All Louisianans
About 7,000 years ago, global sea levels stabilized and the Mississippi River began creating a broad delta at the southern edge of North America. Over millennia, mud from the Missouri River, Ohio River silt, and the sluff off the Ozark Mountains tumbled down the continent and, at the great river’s mouth, spilled and spread into an intricate coastline of inlets, estuaries, and bays. In time, this waterscape became the perfect habitat for oysters, crabs, crawfish, and shrimp – one of the most abundant fisheries in the world.
Long before that, during the Jurassic period, organic matter collected at the bottom of what we now call the Gulf of Mexico and during millions of years, pressed by the weight of the world, transformed into hydrocarbons. In places like the Mississippi Canyon, a mile-deep trench off the river’s terminus, …more
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Weekly Mulch: Dispersants Harm Gulf Spill Workers
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
BP’s relief wells are just short of sealing off the Macondo well, the epicenter of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. For the Gulf community, this milestone might herald a sigh of mental relief. But clean-up workers are feeling the after-effects of working with oil and the chemical dispersants used to dispel it, and physical relief is still a ways off.
Symptoms include...
There are plenty of reports about the toll relief work is taking on Gulf Coast residents who stepped in to clean the oil off sea waters and beaches. Many of these workers, idled from their regular gigs by the BP spill, had little choice about taking on …more
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Who the Hell’s in Charge Here?
A Sneak Peak from our Autumn 2010 Issue
This summer — as we’ve sweated through one punishing heat wave after another — it’s been difficult to know which is the worse environmental disaster: the just-barely-contained BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico or the failure of the US Senate (the “greatest deliberative body in the world”?) to even debate long-overdue climate legislation. The waters of the Gulf and the political culture in Washington seem equally poisoned. Across the country I have heard expressions of surprise that the Macondo oil well has finally, mercifully, been capped. And if many were dismayed by the Senate’s inaction, few people showed astonishment at the legislators’ impasse. Such is the depth of our public cynicism: …more
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Devil’s Bargain: How the BP Disaster Sank the Climate Bill
A Sneak Peek from the Autumn 2010 Issue
A week after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, entertainer Rush Limbaugh suggested that environmentalists had caused the disaster in order to pass cap-and-trade legislation that wouldn’t include new offshore drilling or loan guarantees for the nuclear industry. A massive environmental disaster, on the eve of the fortieth Earth Day celebration, right before the planned introduction of the Senate climate bill — the timing, as Limbaugh noted, seemed too pat. And, in fact, toward the end of the failed Copenhagen climate talks last December, some despondent green campaigners privately confided to each other that they thought only a major disaster could build the public pressure to enact policies sufficiently ambitious to tackle …more
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Oil Work Like “Wrestlin’ with a Tornado”
A glimpse of life in the extraction industry
Amid the vast sea of ink spilled in the course of covering the blowout of BP’s Macondo well, the media has given very little attention to the men (and they’re all men) who do the hard, dirty, and often dangerous work in the oil and gas industry. Partially this is a matter of the inherent biases of storytelling: Any reporter seeking to understand the impact of the BP gusher is naturally going to be more attracted to struggling fishermen and on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy hotel owners than to the saltwater roughnecks who maintain the 3,000 oil and gas drilling and production facilities in the Gulf. But there’s another challenge to getting the oil workers’ story: …more
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Gulf? What Gulf? Obama Admin Goes for More Drilling in Alaska
The Interior Department announced today--a Friday afternoon, perfect for avoiding press--the opening up of oil and gas drilling leases for 1.8 million acres of Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve to oil and gas drilling. Energy and Environment reports that the Bureau of Land Management is selling leases for 190 tracts of land in the reserve, and bidding will close August 11th. The sale is one of dozens, mostly in Western states, that the Interior Department announced in November.
On the positive side, in addition to opening up drilling leases in the reserve, the department …more
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Strain from the Oil Spill Is Beginning to Show
Social Service Providers Report High Rates of Anxiety and Depression
About three weeks ago, I attended a community gathering in Houma, LA put together by the Coast Guard and other government agencies to give Louisianans impacted by the BP blowout a chance to connect with social service providers and to get more information about the spill. Though well intentioned, the event was poorly organized: Instead of hosting a clear and straightforward presentation, the Coast Guard and the Terrebonne Parish authorities had arranged the event like a job fair, with different booths addressing different parts of the crisis. There was table for submitting BP compensation claims staffed a pair of fellows who kind of looked like down-market George Clooney clones. An EPA table; …more
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Beyond Oil Addiction
The Gulf Spill Shows We’re More Like an Abused Spouse
(This piece originally appeared at Alternet.org)
Back in the early aughts, me and Mike Brune (now the head of the Sierra Club) and Jen Krill (today the executive director of the group Earthworks) launched a national grassroots campaign to push U.S. auto companies to move away from oil. I was working then at Global Exchange, Brune and Krill were at Rainforest Action Network, and we hoped that by combining the forces of our two organizations we could jumpstart a new conversation about how our reliance on fossil fuels jeopardized not only the environment but also human rights and national security. The centerpiece of our campaign was a call to …more
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Visualize Tens of Millions of Gallons of Oil
Unless you’re a deep sea fishermen who has spent years trawling the waters of the Gulf of Mexico (and I’m guessing you’re not), it’s pretty hard to wrap your mind around the size of area affected by the BP blowout. As of today, June 25, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has closed about 78,000 square miles to fishing — or roughly one-third of federal waters in the gulf. According to the team at SkyTruth, the oil slick and oil sheen cover about 11,278 square miles and 18,473 square miles respectively.
Eleven thousand square miles is just a tad smaller than the total area of the state …more
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Oil Spill Kills Gulf Coast Shrimp Season; A Culture Hangs in the Balance
"This is the one thing that could destroy our culture and I don't want to see it happen," says Grand Isle, Louisiana resident Karen Hopkins, wiping at tears she's clearly fighting. Hopkins, a Louisiana native and long-time resident of Grand Isle, runs the office at Dean Blanchard Seafood. Blanchard typically buys 13 to 15 million pounds of Gulf Coast shrimp annually. Hopkins' house sits across from what should be a busy loading area for Dean Blanchard Seafood and no more than ten yards from a pier where boats that should be gearing up for a night out shrimping are coming in from a day skimming oil and changing oil-soaked boom.
It's June …more
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Vietnamese Among Hardest Hit By BP Spill
Immigrant Community Relies Exclusively on Fishing
On Monday afternoon, things were pretty quiet at the commercial fishing dock in Port Sulphur, Louisiana. The boat slips were full (a bad sign), but the place was nearly empty of people. A group of five BP-contracted cleanup workers lazed in the shade waiting for orders from higher-ups (“it’s really boring,” one told me). A couple of US Fish and Wildlife Service employees loaded up a boat with cages for capturing oil-soaked birds. The only people who looked like they had a deadline to meet were the Nguyen and Vu families, who were using the closure of fishing waters as a chance to make some repairs on their boats. Despite punishing afternoon …more
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Louisiana Is What Oil Addiction Looks Like
On the Bayou, Fishing and Oil Are Kissin’ Cousins
The front page of the Sunday New Orleans Times-Picayune is dominated by the kind of articles that have become the mainstay of oil spill coverage here: A piece on how local restaurants are coping with the loss of oysters, a review of the tensions between the Coast Guard and BP, and a look at a very similar oil blowout that occurred last year off the coast of Australia. The letters to the editor and the editorials tell a different story. There, the ink is spent on the controversy swirling around President Obama’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. In a pair of editorials on the moratorium, the newspaper’s writers conclude: “The …more
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Oil on the Water
An Eyewitness Account from Barataria Bay
Since the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up and sank 53 days ago, killing 11 men and unleashing a gusher of oil, reporters have complained that federal government officials and representatives of BP have sought to restrict access to oil-impacted sites to manipulate media coverage of the disaster. Here in Grande Isle — ground zero for the spill — the main beach is closed, as is all of adjacent Elmer’s Island, normally a popular vacation spot. The beaches are no-go zones even for homeowners with beachfront property, and the press can hit the sand only by going through a complicated credentialing process. The Coast Guard is arranging media tours by boat, but …more
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Lousiana’s Oystermen Hit the Hardest by Spill
If they can cover the time and fuel costs to get beyond the area closed by the BP oil blowout (granted, a big if), a shrimp captain or fishermen can keep their business going. Louisiana’s oyster farmers are in a much tougher position. Oysters, after all, are raised, not caught. They have to be grown under very specific conditions, places where the water temperature is just right and the mix of salt water and fresh water just so. With the oil slick creeping into the inlets of Louisiana’s coast, those special places risk destruction.
Even as some shrimp and fin fish continue to be offloaded onto the state’s docks, the Louisiana …more
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New Orleans Still Chowing Down
One of the most heart breaking refrains I have heard during my two long days in Louisiana is that the BP oil disaster threatens to destroy “an entire way of life.” For shrimpers, oystermen, and fishermen, that means the loss of the only vocations they’ve ever known. For the people of New Orleans (many of whom have not yet been directly impacted by blowout) it would mean something different: the loss of a regional style of cooking that is embedded in the region’s culture.
New Orleans’ Cajun and Creole cuisines are among the most unique in the nation, thanks, in large part, to the prolific and diverse seafoods that come from …more
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BP Spill: All Hands on Deck!
In the southern marshes and swamplands euphemistically called Barataria “Bay,” local Louisiana fishermen refer to BP as “Bayou Polluter” – and that was before the April 20 blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig operated by the oil giant. Fishermen say BP spills oil every year and they point out marshes still dead from dispersants that were sprayed there.
If President Obama has a say, it’s “Better Pay-up” for the environmental and economic damages that will stem from the uncontrolled leak, likely at 20,000 barrels (840,000 gallons) a day, according to satellite imagery.
In …more
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BP Claims Cap Is Still Working while Second Oil Leak Spills Silently into the Gulf
By Beth Buczynski, Care2
Our partners over at Care2 have shared the following Gulf spill update:
Throughout the five weeks that crude oil has been flowing freely into the Gulf of Mexico, there have been allegations, some fairly well substantiated, that BP isn’t being totally transparent about the extent of the catastrophe.
It has taken weeks to get an accurate idea of how many barrels of oil a day are leaking from the remnants of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. A key government panel now estimates that around 12,000 – 25,000 barrels are leaking from the bottom of the sea each day, dwarfing …more
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