Six Months Later, an Oil Disaster Spreads Across the Gulf
Media Associate, NRDC
Posted: October 20, 2010 08:52 AM
Translation by Autumnson Blog
For six months, I have lived and worked near ground zero of the worst oil disaster in US history. I've traveled on boats hunting thick, reddish peanut butter-colored crude that slowly washed towards the coastal marshes of southern Louisiana. I watched tough, resourceful people of the bayou weep at the sight of the oily tide invading precious fishing grounds.
六個月來，我一直在生活和工作於近美國歷史上最嚴重的石油災難的地面零。我已走過狩獵到厚、紅色花生醬原油的船，油慢慢地被沖向南部路易斯安那州的沿海沼澤地。我看著河口艱辛堅強的、足智多謀的人在哭泣，在見到含油潮漲入侵珍貴漁場的景像時。
It's been an exhausting yet exhilarating experience, and I have grown close to people in this community. I've gotten to know fishing families that are struggling with possible health risks to their children. I've watched divisions and conflicts rise up between fishermen who have been paid to work for BP on the cleanup and those that never got a dime. I've lived here and learned a lot in the process, including rule number one: never get in a boat with someone who doesn't know their way around the bayou. You've never lived until you get stranded on a sandbar in the delta bayou at night and have to swim in the dark through the muddy, alligator-infested waters to safety.
它已是一筋疲力盡但令人振奮的經歷，和我已長得貼近這個社區的人們，我已要認識漁民家庭，他們正在為他們孩子的可能健康風險掙扎。我已見到漁民之間分小圈子和衝突，他們被支付去為BP作清理工作的和那些從未得到一角錢的。我住在這裡和在過程中學到很多東西，包括規則一：永不與不熟海灣周圍路途的人上船，你從未活過直到你晚上在三角洲河口的沙洲上擱淺，和要在在黑暗中游泳穿過泥濘的、鱷魚出沒的水域往安全。
But there was one experience I'll always remember. I was at a Port Sulphur town hall meeting with BP money czar Ken Feinberg when news broke that the BP well was plugged. After 87 days of anxiety and repeated failures to tame the beast, the news was met with mere tepid applause. People were tired and scared of the future. They knew the real test was ahead of them.
但有過一次我永遠記得的經驗，當新聞爆出BP的井堵塞時，我是在硫磺港市政廳會見英國石油公司的金錢沙皇肯范伯格。經過 87天的焦慮和屢次去馴服野獸的失敗，消息遭到單純而不溫不火的掌聲。人們累了和懼怕未來，他們知道真正的考驗是在他們前面。
Once the well stopped spewing crude, it didn't take long for the media to pull out. Without dramatic visuals of a volcano of crude gushing from the bottom of the sea, there were other stories to pursue. But even though most media left, the oil never did. It still washes in with the tide as tar balls and sheen, visible when boat engines kick up the mud in the shallow waters of the marsh.
一旦那井停止噴湧原油，它不需多久給媒體拉出來。沒有戲劇性火山從海底噴發原油的視覺效果，還有其它故事追看。但儘管大多數媒體離開時，油從未離開。它仍然有如焦油球和光澤與潮漲冲入，是可見到的當船用發動機在淺水水域的沼澤揚起泥漿。
Photos by PJ Hahn/Plaquemines Parish in Barataria Bay, October, 2010.照片來自PJ哈恩/普拉克明堂區在巴拉塔里亞灣，2010年10月。
Despite the protests of many fishermen concerned about oil on the bottom, the fishing grounds are nearly all open. But Gulf seafood markets have crashed. America refuses to buy it and some fishermen can't pay for the gas for their boats with the price they're getting for shrimp at the docks.
儘管許多漁民抗議是有關底部的石油，漁場幾乎是全部開放的，但是海灣海鮮市場已崩潰。美國拒絕購買和一些漁民不能支付他們船隻的氣體，以他們在碼頭的花蝦的價錢。
"It's hardly worth it to go out," said Marvin Smith, who parked his boat in the Venice commercial docks last week to unload a night's catch of white and brown shrimp. "They pay less than two dollars a pound, but I got to go out and get them while I can." Smith looked wearily out at the harbor. He would head out again that night, but the market price was not about to change.
“它毫不值得出海，”馬文史密斯說，他上週泊他的船停在威尼斯商業碼頭，去卸貨他一晚白蝦和棕蝦的收穫。 “他們付出不到兩美元一磅，但我得要出海當我可以的時候。”史密斯疲累地望出港口，他將會在那晚上再出去一次，但市場價格並不會改變。
Venice commercial fisherman Marvin Smith Photo by Lisa Whiteman/NRDC威尼斯商業漁民馬汾史密斯 攝影：麗莎懷特曼 /自然資源保護委員會
I've met plenty of fishermen like Marvin over the past six months as a part of a NRDC communications team staffing our Gulf Resource Center in Buras, a once thriving fishing community devastated by Katrina five years ago. People here were close to rebuilding their lives after the storm, only to be hammered by the oil disaster this year.
我已在過去六個月見過很多像馬汾的漁民，作為美國自然資源保護委員會通信隊派員在伯拉斯的海灣資源中心的一部分，那是一個一度是繁榮的漁業社區五年前曾被卡特里娜蹂躪，颱風過後，這裡的人們接近重建完成他們的生活，只在今年被石油災難錘擊。
Buras, once the commercial center of the southern bayou of Plaquemines Parish, is a shell of its former self after 20 feet of water leveled the town five years ago. The town has no real grocery store, and the schools haven't been rebuilt. A refrigerator still hangs in a tree near the main road and broken homes and stores litter the landscape.
"A lot of people here are hurting because fishing is the only life they know," says Mike Brewer, an oil clean-up consultant who ran for the local Parish council this fall. "They are trying to get back on their feet but no one knows what the future holds. It's going to be a painful winter for a lot of folks here."
The pain really began last May for many in this area when the oil first poured into nearby Barataria Bay after threatening the coast for a month. That's when commercial fisherman Mike Roberts took his grandson out on a boat ride to see the damage for himself. When he returned to his home, he was in such a state of shock he couldn't sleep. So in the wee hours of the night, he wrote about his experience that day. He called it the Summer of Tears. Below is an excerpt:
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.
These thoughts still plague fishermen here. They know the bayous like the back of their hands. Many people here know the oil is not gone, and they worry their lives will never be the same. Government assurances that the waters are safe for fishing just don't wash with many of them. Scientistific reports that the marsh is recovering and the oil damage may not be as bad as once thought are met with skepticism by the fishing community here. They know something's not right, the shrimp aren't in the normal places and the large ones don't seem to be migrating out to sea as they normally do this time of year.
I've seen numerous samples of shrimp people have saved with a black substance in their gills. Just this week, an NRDC colleague was taking photos at the Venice marina when she was shown a large grey shrimp by an irate fisherman who claimed the gills were full of hydrocarbons. Is it oil? We don't know, but people have to choose between catching and selling these shrimp or starving themselves. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for them. And it's causing tension in the community.
Shrimp with blackened gills from Venice marina, Oct. 18, 2010來自威尼斯碼頭有弄黑鰓的蝦，二〇一〇年十月一十八日
Photo by Anthony Clark/NRDC
When the government says the oil is gone or dispersed and the seafood is safe--even going into the local schools to convince children--it doesn't go over very well with some people here. They have heard too many stories of oil turning up in crabs and shrimp, too many instances where shrimp boats have churned up sheen behind their nets as they've dragged the bottom.
"If anyone wants to eat the shrimp here then that's their decision," says Kindra Arnesen, wife of a fisherman in Venice and a representative of the Louisiana Coastal Heritage Society. "But I'm not feeding it to my kids until I know it's safe. And I don't have much faith the government knows what's safe and what isn't."
Apparently, most of the rest of America agrees. BP's $100 million PR campaign may convince some that it will "make it right" in the Gulf, but it isn't helping change attitudes about buying the seafood here. According to fishermen and dock owners, the shrimp market price is as bad as it's been in a long time.
But the price of shrimp isn't the only problem down here. The real tragedy after this disaster is that the oil industry will continue to threaten the natural resources of the Gulf. With nearly 50,000 oil and gas wells bored into Gulf, including nearly 4,000 active oil platforms, and the deepest offshore platform in the world that is operated by a consortium of companies including, you guessed it, BP. There is little guarantee this catastrophe won't happen again. More deepwater wells will be drilled; more oil and gas pipelines will crisscross the Gulf marshes, contributing to a loss of 15,000 acres every year. Unless dramatic action is taken to restore these wetlands and change our destructive shipping and oil production habits, there will be nothing left a generation from now.
Meanwhile, economic and political forces are spearheading the campaign to forget this disaster continue their assault. The fishermen and coastal residents fear they will be forgotten and lost in the bureaucratic maze of a bungled claims process. They've seen it before with Katrina. But they fear this will be worse.
Laura Olson, a research scientist with George Washington University's Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management, spent the past five years studying the communities in Plaquemines Parish. In a recent report, she described a community pushed to the brink by the BP oil disaster.
Post oil spill, there has been a dramatic rise in incidents of domestic violence within families. In Plaquemines Parish, in the first quarter 2010, there were 32 reported incidents of domestic violence while in the second quarter of this year since the oil spill began the number of reported incidents more than doubled to 68 reported incidents. Experience within the local practitioner communities and recorded in national mental health research predict that substance abuse, child abuse, financial worries, depression, suicide and other negative impacts can be expected to manifest themselves increase numbers in the impacted communities.
One of those struggling with the economic toll of this disaster is JJ Creppel, a Houma Nation tribal member who lost his boat, had a heart attack and never got a day working on the BP cleanup that has ruined his livelihood. He is hoping to get a small boat to fish and feed his family now living on handouts from friends and a patchwork of charities. "I'm a survivor," he said of his Native American ancestors. But this oil disaster is one of the hardest challenges he's faced.
People like JJ can only survive if we put the right policies in place. Six months after this disaster, the crude will soon be flowing out of the deep wells in the Gulf. The drilling moratorium has been lifted. BP--and its oil behemoth competitors--will soon be back at it, sucking petroleum out of the seabed to feed our insatiable demand for oil and gas.
The fishermen of the Gulf coast know how dangerous it can be to their fishing grounds, yet they feel powerless to stop it. Nearly every fishing family in the Gulf has relative or close friends who depend on the oil business. Who else will put people to work, they ask?
"We've got to get off oil," says Louisiana fisherman Cristian Delano. "We can do everything possible to try to make it safe but there's no way to prevent this from happening again. We've got to find another source of energy or we'll be buying the technology from some other country like China."
That's really the only way to solve this problem. Every president since Nixon has talked about getting off oil but we've done a pitiful job doing it. We send billions of dollars overseas buying a product that threatens our national security and supports potential adversaries. There are alternatives we can turn to, such as the recently announced billion-dollar project to create wind farm transmission lines off the east coast. There's no reason we can't push these technologies here in the Gulf.
Truth is, most residents and fishermen in the bayou aren't focused on energy alternatives. They're just praying that six months from now the shrimp will return to the fishing grounds untarnished, the oyster beds will recover and tar balls will cease peppering the marshes and beaches. Let's hope we all learn from this disaster. Congress needs to take action now to restore and protect the Gulf to enforce tough safety requirements and hold the oil industry accountable for the damage it's done. We need Congress to act now and create new policies that reduce our oil addiction and promote clean energy technologies. Only then can Gulf coast residents--and all of us--feel safe that disasters like this never happen again.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rocky-kistner/post_1096_b_769149.html
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