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Earlier this evening, I sat on a fishing pier at Grand Isle State Park in Southern Louisiana. This island is a central spot for media covering the BP disaster. While lots oil hit shore on Saturday, not much has come up since.
We just rolled in around 3:00 (myself and FDLer Ivan Oleander). When we came into the park, it was made clear that the beach was off limits – but the pier over the beach is OK.
Looking over the edge of the pier, a light sheen of oil stays as the tide recedes. You can see the orange red tint of oil on the beach, as new oil hangs around. There’s a bird eating a dead bird while standing in the oil sheen. While not oiled itself, the bird is right in the thick of what’s there.
“There should at least be someone out here giving the fish an alternative to oiled fish,” said Ivan. “Some bait or something.”
A local man just passed us by. Said he was out at 4:30 in the morning today to fish. Every fish he caught has had eggs. “The seafood industry is dead for the next 15 or 20 years,” he told us.
According to reports from other locals, about 50 men were on the beach at 7am to work. There are several patches of oil buried under sand. Barely any boom. No evidence of any preventative measures. Just nothing.
[Ed. note: post corrected to reflect state, not national park.]
34 Comments
Somber news – thanks for your report and especially for the photographs.
Thanks, Michael, be careful.
No boom in sight. That says it all.
With so many people out of work – not to mention the residents – putting together a CCC response to the Spill could have salvaged a Presidency.
But just like with the Stimulus – which was an incredibly wasted chance to employ men and women from all over the country doing all manner of work including real environmental restoration – like on public lands damaged by the continued mis-management of Ken Salazar – the Stimulus was wasted on making various Contractors richer, and burning up a lot of diesel putting in more asphalt and the like so Americans can burn up even more gasoline with utmost ease.
Sad but so very true.
Thanks for this, Mike. And thanks for being there. It is so sad.
I hear Red-Lobster is gearing up for their newest dish: shrimp saute’ed in sweet crude.
Sorry, none of this is funny.
Still, as terrible as this constant, concentrated, stream of nasty, life-choking petroleum is, there is an even larger increasing flood of derivatives of the same shit pooring into our oceans every day from every stream in the world. I wish I had a number to put to it. It’s got to be orders of magnitude larger than what’s coming from the deep well disaster and it’s been going on for years, it’s getting bigger, it won’t stop, only a miniscule number of people care, and all those chemicals are becoming concentrated in our bodies and the entire food chain.
For close to a million years, we’ve advanced. Now we’re at the point our intelligence has superseded common sense and we’ve forgotten one of the most basic rules: don’t piss in the well. It’s a good thing we’re still smart enough to know not to eat the seed-corn… who’s that on the line dear? Monsanto? Such nice people those corps.
thank you Michael, thank you Jane.
please be careful Michael
Wow, this is going to seem patently obvious to a lot of people, but I just realized the plural of the truncated word for the newest public citizen spells corpse.
Grand Isle is a state park, not a national park. Fact check or lose your credibility.
And this signifies what, exactly? The awfulness is the same.
Are you sure? Now that there’s oil there, I think it belongs to BP. Let’s ask the Governor.
The fact that you could go on the pier but not on the beach indicates to me that BP is concerned about future liability from people who go on the beach and then have health problems. And the state and feds don’t want that liability to fall on them. It is probably this concern that has limited the number of workers thrown at this.
You can’t call out other media about fact-checking unless you are willing to do it yourself.
What it means is it’s Jindal’s park, not Obama’s (or BP’s).
Thank you so much for your kind and generous assistance.
As long as we’re parsing, whose world is it?
Just fact-checking, TDem.
DW
Is BP there ordering people out of the park yet?
Hey, I just took a dump on your porch, so for your own protection, you’ve got to stay inside. And, since the sheriff and I are buds, he’s here with his side-arm to make sure you don’t cause me any grief. Got it? We and the government are your friends. Here, buy some more of our products. We’re selling overpriced pollutants, they’re selling hope and change.
as a professional writer, fact-checking IS a necessary and time consuming task.
That said, this was a pretty minor error that doesn’t really undermine the seriousness of what Whitney’s writing about. I think you oughta cut him a little slack.
Now everyone in Louisiana will be able to drill for oil in their own backyards, thus contributing to the local economy! It’s a win-win!
Now let’s look forward, not backward, and focus on phasing out Social Security. After all, in 20-30 years, how many old people are going to be alive?
Thanks for editing the report, Michael. I realize that you are doing on-scene coverage and trying to move stuff out quickly.
@18: You are correct. I should cut him some slack. He, however, is quick to deal with issues.
So what you’re telling us, indirectly of course, is that this looks like a job for … wait for it…
LAWYERS.
I knew there was a windfall somewhere in all of this.
We used to be such a can-do nation. Now, it’s more like we’re the can-not-do nation. What the hell happened?
Thanks for the reporting; it’s very necessary to get this info out with photos to highlight just how bad this is. I fear that our complacent population still doesn’t “get” it.
And I agree that, given that we have to deal with this disaster, BHO has really, really dropped the ball (no surprise there) in terms of developing a jobs program to employ locals to deal with it. Instead, it seems that BHO is, as usual, fiddling around waiting for BP to “fix” it. If that ain’t a Libertarian dream, then I’m not sure what is. Butfrom the reports that we’ve gotten so far, BP has done a heck of a lousy job in terms of organizing the clean-up effort. So much for how the private sector is ever so much better at absolutely everything, and how the fabled “market” will take care of us all. Yeah, right.
Glad to see FDL is on the Gulf coast covering the disaster. I would like to see more blogs or Internet news sites send people to cover the damage and devastation. There has been much evidence that BP does not want media to cover the ravaged areas of the coast if they are not embedded with BP, if they do not have explicit permission from BP.
I expect you and Ivan will report immediately if BP contractors or the Coast Guard try to get you to leave areas FDL is trying to cover. I don’t want to see FDL kicked out and would like to think BP would simply let press freely cover the scene. But, yesterday’s footage shown on CNN while Rick Sanchez was anchoring indicates press freedom on the coast is being limited.
Wish you the best of luck and look forward to more great reports.
Reagan for one thing. There’s lots more, but start there.
for the non fishing-folk among us, what is the significance of the fish being caught having eggs? thx.
My guess is that it means spawning is beginning and the hatchlings will suffer a big hit wrt mortality. Babies and oil don’t mix?
That’s it exactly. Spring was about 3 weeks late so when the rig blew there were numerous species in the newly hatched and juvenile stages of life. They wouldn’t have survived the toxins in any water column containing oil.
Thank you so much, Michael. Glad we have some FDL on the ground there.
This disaster is so enormously sad, the horror is infuriating. I really have no words for what kind of terrible tragedy unfolds there moment by moment. I just heard a radio report that ended with the sounds of so many birds along the Gulf, living (briefly now, I suppose) and unknowing what is to befall their nesting grounds, their homelands.
The fish sleep in the sea and have no eyelids. I forget who that was. . .maybe Kenneth Patchen. They have no voice we hear, and they are dying out of sight like so much of the other wildlife.
I don’t know how long this can go on before there is any control. When does the Mayan calendar end?
ah, thank you and hotdog very much.
I had to tell you that? We are talking about an oil company, a GOP governor, and a risk-averse President, aren’t we?
Were we talking about liability or lie-ability?
It’s also the case that many toxins are teratogens, meaning that they have particular effects on organisms in the developmental stages of life which are, in addition, particularly susceptible to damage from noxious environments. (I don’t have any cites for this to post now, but imagine the biologists like Jim White might).
I am slightly misquoted in this post as I said they should be giving the |birds| an alternative to eating oiled fish and I am surprised the oil boom we watched being thrown away wasn’t mentioned in this post. Perhaps this is what Michael posted just before we drove to the RV camp.