oil pollution

When I first saw Paul Doomm at a health forum of Gulf residents in New Orleans, he was flat on his back, gasping for air from a seizure that had suddenly overcome him. His mother, father and 11-year old brother were at his side consoling him in the meeting hall of the First Unitarian Church, trying to keep his head from banging against the hard floor as his body went into convulsions.

For more than 30 years, Sarah and her daugher Annette Rigaud owned one of the most popular eateries on Grand Isle, LA. Sarah’s Restaurant is a cozy place filled with mementoes of sun-splashed beach vacations and fishing trips. It was a prosperous business, part of a proud family lineage that dates back to the colonial days of the 1700s here. The Rigauds have endured hurricanes, droughts, disease outbreaks and pirates that once roamed these marsh-filled ocean bayous.

Then the BP oil disaster washed ashore last summer.

Acy Cooper is a proud native son of Venice, LA, a storm-battered fishing and oil service town at the end of the bayou south of New Orleans.  Acy calls this "God's country," home base for some of the best shrimping and fishing in the country. This is where he cut his teeth as a commercial fisherman, just as his father did before him. But after the BP oil disaster spewed nearly 200 million gallons of crude into his fishing grounds, Acy isn't so sure what the future will bring.

For a thousand years, Rosina Philippe and her aunt Geraldine Philippe's families fished and hunted in the Louisiana bayou. As members of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation, they have thrived along the lush marshes and canals of Mississippi River delta, surviving on the fertile environment that sustains and nurtures their lifestyle.

Then the BP oil disaster struck last summer, and things have never been the same.

A version of this blog first appeared on the Neiman Watchdog website

I have worked and lived with the people of the bayou in Buras, LA, for the past six months.  But when the BP well from hell was capped in mid-July, the media ran for the exits as fast as they stormed the bayous in early May. They've barely looked back.

Yesterday, an icy wind whipped through the French Quarter. But inside the New Orleans Sheraton, the atmosphere was hot.

That’s where 250 people gathered to attend a forum sponsored by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Appointed by President Obama, it had just released its final report after a six-month investigation into the nation’s worst oil disaster in history.

With a new year upon us, it’s time to take stock of the historic BP oil disaster and look towards the future. The Deepwater Horizon blow out shined a national spotlight on the oil and gas drilling  in the Gulf, an environmental time bomb that blew 50 miles offshore.

While Americans frantically dash through crowded strip malls, Paul and Michael Orr jump into their 17-foot Boston Whaler ready to hunt for a different kind of merchandise—the kind that grows in the Gulf of Mexico. They are searching for samples of seafood and sediment located in the oil damaged bayous of Louisiana.  And what they have found so far may lead to important revelations about potential contamination along the entire Gulf coast.  

For many here at ground zero of the BP oil disaster, news has fluctuated between the absurd and the insane. On the national front, testimony from the on-going presidential oil spill commission shows a seemingly never-ending cascade of mistakes and dismal safety measures, including a rig technician who missed key signals the well was going to blow up while he was on a smoking break.

A cold northerly wind blew through the bayous of Louisiana last night, bringing near-frost like conditions and hastening the end of the worst shrimp season in memory. Only the small fry are left, and they too are on the move with their larger brethren, swimming out to sea to feed over the winter. They will wait for warmer temperatures of spring before they return to their spawning grounds of the marsh.