Black Tide Report
May 29, 2010
Report from John Ruskey, Quapaw Canoe Company:
A biologist friend of mine flew over the Chandeleur Islands yesterday
and said that even with oil globs washing ashore by far the worst visible
devastation to these critical barrier islands are the canals previously
cut by all oil companies exploring & maintaining the many thousands
of wells scattered along the coastline. These canals and surrounding
construction earthworks are destroying the sensitive marshlands and
brackish water areas that are critical habitat and protect the land
from storm surges and hurricane-generated waves.
This brings home the fact that if you really want to help make things
better you need to start at home. Drive less and walk more. Ride your
bicycle. Avoid plastic products (which are made from petroleum). Conserve
energy. Outfit your house with alternative sources of energy like wind
& solar. Think globally act locally. Think of the Gulf each time
you start your car engine or flood your home with light, or change the
thermostat on a hot summer’s day. We are all complicit in this
spill. America’s insatiable appetite for cheap energy is killing
the Gulf Coast. You can boycott BP (which some people are doing) but
at the same time you might as well be boycotting all gas companies and
opting for conservation and alternative energy. Oil companies will listen
only when the bottom line declines because less fuel is being consumed.
Remember, we are all creating the market for oil.
Things are bad,
that’s obvious by what’s coming to shore. Marine life such
as dolphins, sea turtles and other amphibians & fish are washing
up on beaches. Important birding habitat is increasingly being infected.
But what’s worse is what you can’t see. What’s accumulating
underwater or far out to sea will be washing up for months maybe years
to come and will have unforeseen long-term effects on the entire biota
of the greater Gulf. The Gulf currents are capable of carrying oil contamination
to all areas of the Gulf of Mexico, and then around the tip of Florida
and up the Gulf Stream to the Atlantic States. Who knows, possibly beyond.
The size of this spill is beyond the comprehension of scientists who
are used to small spills in shallow waters.
How to help on
the Gulf? See below a list of the people and organizations who are actively
involved in documenting and protecting the Gulf Coast and its surrounding
water-ways. BP is overseeing the cleanup, so you have to go through
their recruitment process if you want to volunteer for the hands-on
cleanup. www.gulfoilspilljobs.com But you can also volunteer for Audubon
or other organizations and let them tell you where help is needed most.
All organizations could use your monetary donations and long-term support.
Go to their websites and see who makes the most sense to you, and help
them out.
If you’re
concerned about animals, go to the National Wildlife Federation.
For birds, the National Audubon Society
LEAN the Louisiana Environmenal Action Network -- has been helping protect
Louisiana residents for decades from the environmental abuses of big
oil companies.
Gulf Resortation Network
The Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper for the mouth of the Mississippi River
& surrounding Deltas. Sign up for their newsletter for the inside
story & scientific reports not found anywhere else.
For the Atchafalaya River & Delta, The Atchafalaya Basinkeeper.
The Atchafalaya is America’s largest river swamp and sustains
many important estuaries and bay areas, fishing grounds west of the
mouth of the Mississippi. It’s the only place in the State of
Louisiana where an outflowing river system has been allowed to naturally
flow into the Gulf end result: sedimentation & creation of marshlands
& barrier islands.
Louisiana Bayoukeeper.
Mobil Baykeeper.
Below the Surface early on sent its ground team to the Gulf. Sign up
for their Water News Network for up-to-date stories & information
you might not find elsewhere.
The River Will Provide -- Oil Flow Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico Has
Created the Opportunity to Restore Coastal Louisiana
Posted: 27 May
2010 10:08 PM PDT
I knew a worst-case scenario was unfolding as soon as I heard that the
Deepwater Horizon rig blew over one month ago. True to our namesake,
we quickly discovered that there is a lot going on below the surface.
A growing consensus among scientists estimates that over one hundred
million gallons of oil have poured into the Gulf of Mexico so far. Oil
booms are ineffective, dispersants are creating a toxic-stratified chemical
cocktail throughout the Gulf of Mexico, and BP is still calling the
shots while simultaneously dropping the ball.
Our exploration team, from Below the Surface, had plans for a cordial
rendezvous with our friends and partner organizations in Louisiana as
a follow-up to an expedition we launched down the Atchafalaya River
this past February, which is chronicled in the June/July issue of Reader's
Digest Instead we found ourselves in a much different scenario--defense
as opposed to offense. As our crew motored in the warm, turquoise waters
off the Gulf Coast National Seashore, a National Park, with a pod of
20+ bottle-nosed dolphins, I knew that their fate had been sealed. I
did all I could to keep my tears hidden from the other guys onboard
behind my aviator sunglasses. The damage has been done; we need to recognize
that the disaster has occurred! When I first arrived, I expected to
see scores of oiled-birds being taken to the triage centers and thick
goo lapping up on the beaches--I was conditioned to the images of the
Exxon-Valdez spill.
However, this travesty
is completely different from the one that occurred in Alaska over twenty-years
ago. That was a spill of a finite amount. This is still flowing, and
marine life is taking the brunt of the impact. We've found dead dolphins
and dead sea turtles and countless jellyfish (a staple for sea turtles)
washing up everywhere despite the fact that the alluring greenish-blue
waters and white-sand beaches appeared to be clean. This makes the dispersants
a prime culprit. The dispersants in and of themselves are toxic, and
the compounds they create when interacting with oil make them even more
toxic. Worse yet, dispersants spread oil throughout water column contaminating
a higher percentage of the ocean instead of concentrating oil on the
surface.
It is fairly safe
to say that most containment methods have been for aesthetic purposes.
Oil continues to flow, and BP's several attempts at containment have
all failed. The contingency techniques and their names offer little
assurance: top hat/top kill, junk shot, and insertion. How about a shot
in the dark? After all, that's exactly what this is. BP has repeatedly
claimed that this type of recovery operation has never been done in
5,000 feet of water. Why then were they allowed to take such a calculated
risk by scraping the bottom by the barrel for oil without a response
strategy?
Had we invested
more in our oceans, this travesty may have been averted or quickly resolved.
On the contrary, we know very little about our oceans; in fact, about
90% of our oceans remain unexplored. It is disturbing to think that
we have better maps of Mars than of our own oceans. NOAA and other marine
exploration institutions are desperately underfunded relative to other
fields. For instance, NASA's annual budget would fund NOAA's budget
to explore our oceans for 1,600 years. It is time to focus on the reality
of issues faced by our planet and America's waterways.
Many feel that
this disaster has been worse than Katrina, and the impacts will be felt
for a much longer period of time. This man-made disaster has been and
will be destructive to the Louisiana coastline for the exact same reasons
as Hurricane Katrina--the vanishing wetlands.
What's the Solution?
This solution runs
parallel to the discoveries we made while underway on the Atchafalaya
expedition, dubbed Gaining Ground. Louisiana loses about one football
field of land every hour, which equates to land loss of about 30 square
miles per year and is approximately 2,300 square miles since 1930 gone!
This is because the highly managed, dredged, and leveed Mississippi
River no longer provides sediment to replenish coastal wetlands. In
contrast, we found that the Atchafalaya River has the only two growing
deltas in Louisiana. This is because the river is allowed to exist in
a more natural state and sediment slows down and settles to form new
coastal marshland known as accretion (the opposite of erosion).
When we leveed rivers, we lost the resiliency of the entire area; the
best thing we can do is open up substantial and strategically placed
diversions that flow around 100,000 cubic feet per second to provide
the sediment necessary for rebuilding the coast. The river can do the
work for us and reverse the damage done relatively quickly!
The hasty, man-made
creation of barrier islands off the coast is panic-based, not science-based
and may be more destructive to the coast long-term. I spoke with a number
of leaders spearheading Gulf Coast conservation efforts and they believe
that dredged up barrier islands will be expensive and will fail. They
will certainly fail from a hurricane surge and hurricane season begins
the first of June. Selectively breaching the levees to let the Mississippi
River naturally reconstitute the wetlands is likely cheaper and offers
a permanent benefit. Seemingly irreparable damage to wetland marshes
has ensued, but nature will rebuild if we rebuild the natural conditions
that make it all possible.
With all of the
conservation work going on in the Gulf Coast, it seems to me that if
it were easy to just build these islands, it would have been done decades
ago. Repairing this disaster is beyond our control; the Mississippi
River brings over 200,000 dump-truck loads of sediment to the Gulf of
Mexico every day. Unfortunately most of that is sent over the continental
shelf. We need to match power with power by following nature's model;
the river will provide!
To minimize collateral
damage, we must stop the use of any and all dispersants. Our public
servants must raise the liability cap retroactively and through the
roof! In addition, politicians should pass the Bingaman Baucus Senate
Bill to provide $900 million per year for conservation from oil revenues.
To guarantee transparency within the Unified Command we must create
an NGO Representative position to serve as an ombudsman to for a more
coordinated front of the well-established and experienced groups in
the area. Last, but certainly not least, it would be prudent to focus
on the often-overlooked issue of actually stopping the oil flow instead
of allowing BP to try to salvage the well.
Southern Hospitality
I returned to the
south to help my friends from various organizations and universities
because of the care and generosity they have shown me. I believe that
they are conditioned to be so hospitable because they are survivors.
The ever-giving people in the South are in need of help. Despite all
of the adversity bestowed upon the South our fellow Americans are in
trouble, their true voices are not getting heard, the truth is not being
revealed, and there are still a lot of questions that remain unanswered.
Remember, the only
way to solve an environmental disaster is to work with nature. In the
words of my dear friend and legendary outfitter and guide, John Ruskey,
"May the river be with you."
Kristian Anders Gustavson, Co-Founder of Below the Surface.
Summer
Of Tears
by Mike Roberts. Louisiana Bayoukeeper
The boat ride,
out, from Lafitte, Louisiana, Sunday, May 23, 2010, to our fishing grounds
was not unlike any other I have taken in my life, as a commercial fisherman
from this area. I have made the trip thousands of times in my 35 plus
years shrimping and crabbing. A warm breeze in my face, it is a typical
Louisiana summer day. 3 people were with me, my wife Tracy, Ian Wren,
and our grandson, Scottie. I was soon to find out, how untypical this
day would become for me, not unlike a death in the family. This was
going to be a very bad day for me.
As we neared Barataria
Bay, the smell of crude oil in the air was getting thicker and thicker.
An event that always brought joy to me all of my life, the approach
of the fishing grounds, was slowly turning into a nightmare. As we entered
Grand Lake, the name we fishermen call Barataria Bay, I started to see
a weird, glassy look to the water and soon it became evident to me,
there was oil sheen as far as I could see. Soon, we were running past
patches of red oil floating on top of the water. As we headed farther
south, we saw at least a dozen boats, in the distance, which appeared
to be shrimping. We soon realized that shrimping was not what they were
doing at all, but instead they were towing oil booms in a desperate
attempt to corral oil that was pouring into our fishing grounds. We
stopped to talk to one of the fishermen, towing a boom, a young fisherman
from Lafitte. What he told me floored me. He said, "What we are
seeing in the lake, the oil, was but a drop in the bucket of what was
to come." He had just come out of the Gulf of Mexico and he said,
"It was unbelievable, the oil runs for miles and miles and was
headed for shore and into our fishing grounds". I thought, what
I had already seen in the lake was enough for a lifetime. We talked
a little while longer, gave the fisherman some protective respirators
and were soon on our way. As we left the small fleet of boats, working
feverishly, trying to corral the oil, I became overwhelmed with what
I just saw.
I am not real emotional
and consider myself a pretty tough guy.You have to be to survive as
a fisherman. As I left that scene, tears flowed down my face and I cried.
Something I have not done in a long time, but would do several more
times that day. I tried not to let my grandson, Scottie, see me crying.
I didn't think he would understand, I was crying for his stolen future.
None of this will be the same, for decades to come. The damage is going
to be immense and I do not think our lives here in South Louisiana will
ever be the same. He is too young to understand. He has an intense love
for our way of life here. He wants to be a fisherman and a fishing guide
when he gets older. It is what he is, it is in his soul, and it is his
culture. How can I tell him that this may never come to pass now, now
that everything he loves in the outdoors may soon be destroyed by this
massive oil spill? How do we tell this to a generation of young people,
in south Louisiana who live and breathe this bayou life that they love
so much, could soon be gone? How do we tell them? All this raced through
my mind and I wept.
We continued farther
south towards Grand Terre Island. We approached Bird Island. The real
name is Queen Bess Island, but we call it Bird Island, because it is
always full of birds. It is a rookery, a nesting island for thousands
of birds, pelicans, terns, gulls etc. As we got closer, we saw that
protective boom had been placed around about two thirds of the island.
It was obvious to me, that oil had gone under the boom and was fouling
the shore and had undoubtedly oil some birds. My God. We would see this
scene again at Cat Island and other unnamed islands that day. We continued
on to the east past Coup Abel Pass and more shrimp boats trying to contain
some of the oil on the surface. We arrived at 4 Bayou Pass to see more
boats working on the same thing. We beached the boat and decided to
look at the beach between the passes.
The scene was one
of horror to me. There was thick red oil on the entire stretch of beach,
with oil continuing to wash ashore. The water looked to be infused with
red oil, with billions of, what appeared to be, red pebbles of oil washing
up on the beach with every wave. The red oil pebbles, at the high tide
mark on the beach were melting into pools of red goo in the hot Louisiana
sun. The damage was overwhelming. There was nobody there to clean it
up. It would take an army to do it. Like so much of coastal Louisiana,
it was accessible only by boat. Will it ever be cleaned up? I don't
know. Tears again. We soon left that beach and started to head home.
We took a little
different route home, staying a little farther to the east side of Barataria
Bay. As we approached the northern end of the bay, we ran into another
raft of oil that appeared to be covering many square miles. It was only
a mile from the interior bayous on the north side of Barataria Bay.
My God. No boats were towing boom in this area. I do not think anyone
even knew it was there. A little bet farther north, we saw some shrimp
boats with boom, on anchor, waiting to try and protect Bayou St. Dennis
from the oil. I alerted them of the approaching oil. I hope they were
able to control it before it reached the bayou. We left them and started
to head in.
My heart never
felt so heavy, as on that ride in. I thought to myself, this is the
most I've cried since I was a baby. In fact I am sure it was. This will
be a summer of tears for a lot of us in south Louisiana. — Michael
Roberts
Louisiana Bayoukeeper, Inc
You can find Notes
From The Louisiana Bayoukeeper here:
http://lmrk.org/notes-from-the-louisiana-bayoukeeper/
http://www.island63.com/
www.voiceofthewetlands.org/