During the past eleven weeks I’ve been on and around the edges of Barataria Bay for many days. This is ground-zero for the oil mess clean-up in southern Louisiana, a 650-square-mile jigsaw puzzle of marshes and wetlands where hundreds of workers have been sweating for weeks, valiantly attempting to wipe, absorb and suck up the oil which has penetrated it deeply.
If you haven’t been there in person, it’s hard to describe just how convoluted the place is. Imagine it this way, using that puzzle analogy: Think of a 1,500-piece jigsaw puzzle spread out on a table. Now randomly take half those pieces away, the pieces that remain resemble the bay.
It is a jagged, unformed piece of shallow water and low-lying land with no straight lines and thousands of corners, inlets, shallows and loosely connecting waterways. Today, oil has seeped into nearly every corner. Policing it – trying to stop it from entering, with booms – proved impossible. Skimming oil off the surface has worked to a degree, but even the dozens of fishing boats armed with skimmers can only make a dent. Cleaning it up once the oil has invaded the edges of the marshes is, well, a nightmare. Imagine trying to scrub individual pieces of sea grass by hand or vacuum out bubbly brown crude that has penetrated several feet into the wetlands.
During a recent weekend on the bay I was able to see the efforts being coordinated by a variety of local and non-local contractors, who have each hired workers, some from the area, some from other states. While there appears to be lots of activity on the bay – boats zooming here and there, floating villages set up as way stations – there seems to be little authority or control.
For the rest of my dispatch plus video from Barataria Bay, go to takepart.com.
For nearly forty years one of the planet’s most energy-rich continents has been ruled successfully by international treaty. It has also been off-limits to drilling for the sizable oil reserves, which lie off its shores.
Of course given that no one lives in Antarctica (other than a few thousand seasonal scientists) and that much of it is covered by two miles of ice makes it a tough place to drill and far more easily managed than say Gaza or Afghanistan. Its remoteness has kept its vast offshore oil resources far more easily protected than those in the Gulf of Mexico or the deserts of Saudi Arabia.
Yet the ice-cover in both the Antarctic and Arctic gradually disappears, each region — rich with oil and other precious minerals — is being viewed anew, with many eyeing future resource development.
The treaty that governs Antarctica officially keeps the continent off-limits to drilling for oil until 2041. It’s a different story in the Arctic. As the Arctic Ocean’s annual sea ice cover disappears – many believe that within two decades the region will be ice-free during the summer – competition has already begun among its neighboring countries (the U.S., Canada, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway plus Iceland and Greenland) over who owns what, especially when it comes to oil. (For the rest of my dispatch from the Arctic, go to takepart.com.)
I’m beginning to feel like something of a jinx. I go to the Antarctic Peninsula every austral summer and invariably while I’m there ships run aground, or sink. I slink into the U.K. for an anticipated 48 hours and an erupting volcano shuts down 8 million travelers. And the very week that we are putting the finishing touches on a new film, two years in production, about the complex relationship between man and the sea in southern Louisiana … catastrophe strikes the Gulf of Mexico, impacting many of the fishermen, conservationists and activists featured in it. (Not to mention my several Chilean friends who are still leading efforts to clean up their coastline and get people back in homes before winter arrives down south.)
Just how bad are these recent seeming-catastrophes?
Even as Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano belches anew (yesterday its drifting ash shut down airspace over Ireland and Scotland, nothing like the damage done by cancellation of 100,000 flights while I was there) by comparison to past blasts it remains a small burp.
How small? In 1815, on the island of Sumbawa (in today’s Indonesia), a volcano named Tambora sputtered and coughed for nearly two weeks before blowing 24 cubic miles of lava into the sky, opening up a crater more than three miles wide and a mile deep. More than 120,000 people died, largely because everything around them – vegetation, marine life – was smothered by ash causing crop failures and epidemics.
Sixty-eight years later, Krakatoa spewed just 3.5 cubic miles of molten rock and ash; Vesuvius 1.4 cubic miles and Mt. St. Helens, in 1980, 0.3 cubic miles. Each of those was considered major; Iceland’s recent burp was just that. Yet it shut down all of Europe for six days, impacting the world’s economy to the tune of between $2 and $3 billion.
Similarly, as the Times reports this morning, the ongoing spillage in the Gulf of Mexico are – for the moment – far from record-setting. (Its list includes the 36 billion gallons of oil spilled by retreating Iraqis during their retreat from Kuwait in 1991 and the Ixtoc 1 blowout in the Bay of Campeche, Mexico, in 1979, which dumped 140 million gallons of crude oil before it was stopped. The Exxon Valdez’s 11 million gallons is the biggest spill since.) Of course we won’t know for some weeks/months to come just how much the Deepwater Horizon will leak into the ocean.
But as winds and currents for the moment are keeping much of the leaking oil from washing ashore in the Gulf States – though trade winds may very well carry the spillage around the southern tip of Florida and eventually up the Atlantic coastline – there is a kind of creeping “out of sight, out of mind” mentality in the mainstream press.
Not so dissimilar from the attitude towards offshore drilling itself, until a couple weeks ago. If you can’t see the rigs from shore, they must not be a problem. If the majority of the now-spilling oil doesn’t come ashore but stays out to sea, disaster has been averted. Unless of course you’re a dolphin, whale, mollusk, seabird or fishermen, whose lives and livelihoods depend on a clean, healthy ocean.
We are in the process of finishing a big, beautiful, provocative film about Southern Louisiana, focused on the relationship between man and the sea … so obviously when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, inflamed, sank and now continues to pump oil into the Gulf of Mexico we are watching with a vested interest. (In our film – Sola, Louisiana Water Stories – current Governor Bobby Jindal is on camera telling an interviewer that one of the “beauties” of Louisiana is that are no oil spills ….)
One of the conservation activists we profile in the film, Tracy Kuhns, is the Louisiana Bayoukeeper – affiliated with the international Waterkeeper Alliance – as well as running the Fishing Community Family Support Center. Her husband, Michael Roberts, is a fisherman and they live on Bayou Barataria where fishing is down for multiple reasons, one being the waste left behind by oil and gas explorations and takings going back many decades.
A shrimper on his way home at day's end, up Bayou Lafourche. Photo: Fiona Stewart
I asked her for her take on the still-growing oil spill in the Gulf, now spreading through Louisiana’s fertile fishing grounds (40 percent of the US.’s seafood comes from the Gulf of Mexico):
Tracy Kuhns: “As a resident of one of Louisiana’s many coastal fishing communities, I am very worried and saddened, right now, about the massive, on going, oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The media, government agencies and naturally, the environmental community seem so wrapped up with the oil they can see on the surface, it’s as if, that is all there is to the spill. While dealing with what is seen on the surface if urgent and extremely important to minimizing damage to our estuaries, our fishermen know from experience, with inland and other offshore oil spills, that what is on the surface is nothing compared to what will cover the water bottom and can not be seen. They know that after everyone proclaims the clean up to be complete and the fishermen go back fishing, their nets will come up covered in oil tar and that they will not be able to fish, in the area of the spill, for years to come. A complete clean up never happens, so this oil spill is bound to have long term impacts on the Gulf of Mexico and Inland fisheries for years to come, (Approx. 90% of Gulf Marine Species spend some portion of their life cycle in our estuaries). What will it take for us to learn that oil and gas are not worth the long term costs to the environment, communities and the people of the Gulf Coast? Why do we accept coastal destruction and erosion, oilfield debris, oil and gas explosions, spills and pollution as a necessary trade for jobs? Why are we willing to trade sustainable local seafood, tourism and recreational jobs for destructive, polluting ones? When will our legislators begin to move towards bringing us jobs from clean energy development (solar, etc), rather then hanging on to the past and continuing to support social and environmental destruction in the name of the economy? Jobs that promote sustainable, local small businesses and communities rather then pushing forward with industrialization of seafood production, which will cause further environmental destruction, fish population decline, and the collapse of local coastal community economies. Have we not learned anything from the industrialization of our farming communities and the resulting environmental and social destruction? Dead Zone in the Gulf and the loss of family farms and communities. Jobs where we produce and build what we need, locally, rather then importing it from elsewhere. When will those, who claim to serve the people, stand up for us, our communities and our natural resources, rather then corporate interests and environmental and social devastation?”
Good questions. Any comments?
A fiery reminder of our continued addiction to fossil fuels lit up the sky fifty miles off the coast of Louisiana yesterday when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. After 36 hours the 396-foot-long, 256-foot-wide rig sank; its leasors – British Petroleum – insisted that pollution from the fire would be minimal, since most of the oil would simply burn off. I wrote about the accident at length at Take Part’s The Current.
The timing – on the eve of the 40th Earth Day – is an impeccable reminder of the real-life impacts of the oil drilling which many Republicans, and some Democrats in Congress regard as our best way towards “energy independence.” The hallow chant of “Drill Baby, Drill” must now be followed by “Burn Baby, Burn.” Nighttime images of the fire, which killed at least eleven oil workers, resemble a Satanic ritual afloat in the heart of the ocean.
There’s nothing like announcing a plan that could bring new oil rigs to 300 million acres of ocean to start a loud conversation among ocean-lovers of all stripes. Which is exactly what President Obama did a week ago, reopening a debate that many of his supporters thought was moot once candidates McCain and Palin had been shunned.
By coincidence, I was in Louisiana when the announcement was made, where a $65 billion a year gas and oil industry is THE state’s major business and the Gulf of Mexico coastline has long been dotted by oil rigs (and oil spills). We have been filming in southern Louisiana for the past 21 months, focused on the relationship between man and the sea. In “SoLa” it is impossible to ignore the impact that oil and gas have on both the populace and the waterways.
The Obama administration’s plan could prove to be either be savvy politics or blatant pandering. In the immediate future it curries favor with pro-drilling interests and helps lure some pro-development Democrats – like Virginia’s Mark Warner and Jim Webb – to potentially support other climate change initiatives. The reality is that the first lease sale under the plan could take place off the coast of Virginia within a few months; the rest would not start lining up until 2012, but probably longer given anticipated state and court fights. The argument that opening up these new domestic resources will help push us away from dependence on foreign oil is a false one; even if all of the continental shelves proposed are tapped there’s only enough oil there to last for three years, enough natural gas for two. Not all Washington politicians were charmed: “Giving Big Oil more access to our nation’s waters is really a ‘Kill, Baby, Kill’ policy,” said New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenburg.
And what’s the reality of having big rigs in your backyard, plus all the tanker and barge traffic that accompanies them? Use Louisiana as an example.
Some years ago the state set up the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office, to “protect Louisiana’s citizens and environment from the effects of oil spills.” Today the state leads the U.S. in annual oil spills; between 1991 and 2004 an average of 1,500 per year (and those are just spills in state waters, the stats don’t include federal waters – three miles offshore – where many of the oil rigs live and where many of the new drilling is proposed). While we were filming in July 2008 two barges collided near midnight on the Mississippi River, in the heart of New Orleans, spilling 400,000 gallons into the river and spreading 80 miles downstream within 24 hours.
The mother of all recent Louisiana oil spills? Hurricane Katrina, when more than 9 million gallons of oil were lost, nearly comparable to the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska (11 million gallons). During Hurricane Rita another 1 million gallons leaked into Louisiana’s rivers and the Gulf … statistics which should give all coastal residents of the East Coast and Alaska pause.
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