A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [136]
What about dolphins? “It doesn’t look like many died,” Lubchenco says, brightening a bit. “We brought some people in to tag them. And from the tagging we can see them still moving around, alive and seeming to behave normally.”
Corals? Oyster beds?
“So far we haven’t seen oil in corals,” Lubchenco says, “though we haven’t finished looking everywhere yet. But oysters—they’re toast.”
“In Louisiana,” says Allen, “they decided to send so much fresh water through the delta to keep the oil outside the marshes, they committed oystercide—or whatever you’d call it.”
In May, Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal, supported by local parish officials, ordered technicians to open giant valves on the Mississippi River, releasing torrents of fresh water with the idea of pushing any oil off the coast. The fresh water largely demolished southeastern Louisiana’s oyster beds, killing far more oysters than did the oil.
“Again, that’s local officials doing what they think is expedient. Oyster beds have to be reseeded and started over again.”
(In September, it seems as if shallow-water coral reefs may escape oil damage. But in November 2010, researchers on one of NOAA’s ships will find dead deep-water corals seven miles southwest of the Macondo well, 4,500 feet deep, where researchers last spring had discovered drifting hydrocarbon plumes. The expedition’s chief scientist, Charles Fisher of Pennsylvania State University, will comment, “We have never seen anything like this at any of the deep coral sites that we’ve been to, and we’ve been to quite a lot.” Dr. Lubchenco will say, “This is precisely why we continue to actively monitor the Gulf.”)
Lubchenco starts to gather her things and says, “I really have to get going, but we’ve been talking about the ecological dimensions of this disaster, and yet the human disaster here is very, very real.”
“We on the government side need to get better at making it known that we understand that people’s emotional reactions—the passion and the angst—are the right way to feel about this,” Allen adds. “This is grieving.”
“So many communities, so many individuals are just devastated,” Lubchenco points out. “The federal government did an insufficient job communicating real compassion. Not that those in government didn’t care, but it didn’t come across to people as compassion.”
“I’ll give you a good example of the problem here,” the admiral says. “We are not allowed under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 to use money from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to do anything about behavioral health.”
Lubchenco shakes her head and breathes, “Isn’t that just ridiculous?”
“It’s not allowed,” Allen says. “Nor was BP, the responsible party, required to do anything for mental wellness.”
“A lot of changes need to be made,” Lubchenco says, though her agency’s charge is oceans and weather forecasting, not emotional health.
Of course, that’s the space between angst and suicide.
“So we had a charter boat captain in Alabama who did commit suicide,” Allen says somberly. “So I went to BP and said, ‘You have to give money to these states to set up an 800 number for suicide prevention counseling.’ This had nothing to do with my job as national incident commander. But it’s what the country expects out of the whole government response. And that’s a conversation we have to have.”
This conversation is coming to a close. We’ve been here for two hours; Jane’s got a plane to catch. We rise and shake hands, and I thank them for their valuable time.
Allen begins to turn away, then suddenly turns back to me and says, “One last thought: large corporations and the government are usually not capable of the conspiracies that are attributed to them. A lot of what seems like conspiracies has to do with just plain culture, capacity, and ineptness.”
Lubchenco nods and agrees: “I can’t believe all the conspiracy theories I’ve heard.” She rolls her eyes and smiles, and says, “It’s been hell.”
On Sunday, September 19, with the cementing