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NEW ORLEANS (AP) - After three long months, the bleeding from
the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico has been finally, mercifully
stanched. But in so many ways, the prognosis remains uncertain.
Which species will rebound, and which have been pushed beyond
the brink? Has the oil accelerated the die-off of marshlands that
protect one of America's great cities and make this the nation's
second most-productive fishing region? What effect will the BP
spill have on the future of deep-sea drilling - at once boon and
bane - in the Gulf?
And, of more immediate concern to people along the nation's
southern coast, where will the millions of as-yet uncollected,
unburned, unseen gallons of oil from the blown-out Deepwater
Horizon well end up?
Second-generation Plaquemines Parish resident Sandy Reno isn't
sure she wants to wait around to find out the answers.
"I'm ready to pack up and leave," says Reno, 43, whose
shrimper husband, like so many others along this coast, is now
dependent on cleanup work from the company held responsible for the
disaster. "When you've had enough, you've had enough. I've had
enough already."
Just as the stumbling federal response to Hurricane Katrina five
years ago exposed not just chinks, but spider web networks of
fissures in our national armor, the failure to prevent and then
quickly stop the spill has shaken many people's faith in American
might.
"We're a superpower - the United States," New Orleans chef and
sometime fishing guide Eric Schutzman said recently as he took a
break from carving up a batch of black drum and redfish caught in
an unclosed section of Black Bay. "We put a man on the moon. You'd
think we'd have enough brilliant minds to get it all cleaned up and
get on with it."
Since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 and sank 50
miles off the tip of Louisiana, as much as 184 million gallons of
crude have hemorrhaged into the gulf.
To get an idea of what Gulf Coast residents might be facing,
many have looked back to the region's last worst drilling accident
- the 1979 Ixtoc spill. It took Pemex, Mexico's state-owned oil
company, 10 months to contain the spill. By then, 140 million
gallons of crude had bled into the gulf.
Wes Tunnell, associate director of the Harte Research Institute
for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi,
is traveling the region, looking for traces of the spill and
speaking to people who lived through it. His blog is plastered with
photos of red mangrove roots clogged with thin, weathered tar mats
- possibly from Ixtoc.
Tunnell and his colleagues interviewed 74-year-old Jose Chay, a
longtime fisherman in Celestun, Yucatan. Chay told Tunnell that the
spill forced locals to switch to jobs like salt mining, crabbing in
the lagoon or making charcoal from the region's lush forests.
"They did these things for varying periods of time," Tunnell
writes, noting that some started back fishing in about two years,
but with poor results. "Others got back to fishing in 4-5 years
when things seemed to be back to usual for the fin fish but not
shellfish."
But, Chay told Tunnell, "it permanently killed all of the
oysters and clams, the same thing we heard in Isla Arenas
yesterday."
Large sections of the U.S. Gulf Coast - which accounts for 60
percent to 70 percent of the oysters eaten in the U.S. - have been
closed to harvesting. It remains to be seen what effect the spill
will have on the fishery.
Some watermen have been pulling up gape-shelled, dead oysters.
But that is likely a byproduct of the state's efforts to keep the
oil out of inland waters by diverting thousands of gallons of fresh
water into the estuaries, says Mike Voisin, a member of the
Louisiana Oyster Task Force.
A meeting is scheduled in early August to determine the next
harvest season. But Voisin says it could be years before the
spill's effects on the industry will be known.
"We always have three crops of oysters on the bottom, or
three-year classes," says Voisin, owner of Motivatit Seafoods in
Houma. "So when you're thinking about mortality, you're not just
thinking about this year's harvest. You're thinking about 2010, '11
and '12's harvest."
Oysters, shrimp and other valuable commercial fisheries depend
on the continued health of the marshlands that nurse and nurture
the species upon which the industry rests.
Louisiana, home to 40 percent of the nation's coastal wetlands,
has been losing 35 to 50 square miles of marsh a year for decades -
much of it from the ditching and canal digging activities connected
to the oil industry. In places where oil has intruded, marsh
grasses have turned brown and brittle, but it is unclear yet how
deep the death goes.
When talking about the marshes to laypeople, chemical
oceanographer Thomas Bianchi likes to use the analogy of a giant
tea bag.
"When you put a tea bag in water, the tea that you see are
organic compounds, that's coming from the tea leaves," says
Bianchi, a professor at Texas A&M University. "So you get that
kind of release from the normal healthy marshes as they grow and
die."
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Bianchi is
leading a team that will soon gather thousands of liters of water
from Barataria Bay.
Through a process called reverse osmosis/electrodialysis, they
will distill that down to hundreds of milliliters. That concentrate
will be subjected to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and
other processes to determine whether the marsh is dying at the
roots, not just above the water line, and how much of the petroleum
- and the 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersants dumped on it
- has gotten into the food chain.
Bianchi, who fled New Orleans and his job at Tulane University
after losing his home to Hurricane Katrina, says his "gut
feeling" is that the marshes have died below the water. If that is
the case, he's concerned that this die-off could have a "cascading
effect."
"It just makes the whole estuary more vulnerable."
Bianchi expects to have some preliminary test results in a
matter of days or weeks. But it may well be two or three years
before the spill's impact on the deep-sea environment, says Jeffrey
Baguley, a marine biologist at the University of Nevada.
These communities of organisms are big players in the processing
and recycling of organic carbon, says Baguley, who specializes in
the study of marine invertebrates. There is still a lot of oil
floating beneath the water's surface, and Baguley is concerned
about how much of it will end up on the seafloor.
"We have organisms that live there in the deep sea that we're
not sure of their overall function, their overall impact," he
says. "So it's always prudent to err on the side of caution when
you're impacting organisms you don't fully understand."
Another industry whose future is uncertain is deep-sea oil
drilling.
The federal courts have blocked one Obama administration
drilling moratorium, but the Interior Department issued a new one
this week. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is asking for a special
legislative session to consider putting a constitutional amendment
on the November ballot that would ban drilling within 10 miles of
the state's beaches.
The notion of halting all deepwater drilling until we know what
happened here might seem a no-brainer to many people in other parts
of the country. But here, where many families have feet in both
industries, people are seriously conflicted.
Even those who have been damaged most by the spill are now
wholly dependent on the industry. Compensation payments and cleanup
contracts from BP have put many in the region on a kind of
artificial life support, forestalling what could be major life
decisions.
When the fishing is good, Wayne and Lisa Ledet, owners of Doris
Seafood in Hopedale, make $500 to $1,000 a day packing crabs,
oysters and shrimp for the Baltimore market. Now, their $80,000 ice
machine is churning for just one customer: BP.
The Ledets won a contract to provide ice to three camps where BP
is housing workers. Gypsy Gordon, 40, and boyfriend Shawn Platt,
45, were on the verge of pulling up stakes and heading to Florida
when the Ledets hired them to fill plastic bags with ice.
With Platt shoveling, they fill 500 bags a day, at 35 cents
apiece. They're making about $100 less than they're used to, says
Platt, "but it's a paycheck."
"And it's air conditioned," quips Gordon.
BP employees tell them the company plans to be in Hopedale for
two to three years.
"I'd rather be here bagging ice than anywhere else," says
Gordon.
But for some, this spill, coming on the heels of so many
devastating hurricanes, has stretched the bonds of place.
If Sandy Reno could take her 13-year-old son and leave right
now, she would.
"There was nothing down here for women after Katrina, anyway,"
she says, emerging from a pharmacy in the town of Port Sulphur, a
20-mile drive from her home in Boothville. "We used to have shops
and a fitness center and a pool at the YMCA. We don't even have
that anymore. This a man's place. Just look around."
But she knows there aren't many places where a man like her
husband, George, 52, with a seventh-grade education, could run his
own business and thrive.
"If he was to take a crew boat job or be a tug boat driver, I
think he could do it," says Sandy Reno, who kept the books for the
family's two shrimp boats - the Captain Bubby and Little Dipper.
"But that's not what he's done. He's always worked for hisself."
Only now, he's working for BP - and still waiting to be paid for
more than a month's labor.
Work on the two relief wells intended to kill the well once and
for all is expected to be completed next month. But experts say tar
balls and oil mats will continue to wash ashore from Texas to
Florida - and perhaps beyond - for years to come.
As Louisiana's poet laureate, Darrell Bourque might be expected
to have written something about the spill. But he's still too
overwhelmed.
"I don't know how yet to translate that into the language of a
poem," the 68-year-old writer said from the family farm where he
grew up near Opelousas in rural St. Landry Parish.
To a large extent, Bourque's poetry is grounded in his belief
that humans are just extensions of the landscape.
"One of the great lies and the great myths we've told ourselves
is that there's a division between the natural world and the human
world," he says. "And I think we're as much an extension of the
natural world as the plankton and the pelican."
As sympathetic as he is about the plight of fishermen, oil
workers and others who are hurting, Bourque has tired of hearing
people talk about losing their "way of life." As far as he is
concerned, it's that "way of life" that brought the gulf to the
edge of the abyss.