A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [37]
Birds that are lightly oiled, like the ones here today, often raise fewer, slower-growing chicks than normal.
Some oiled animals may eventually be rescued and cleaned. Less possible to cleanse is the anguish on the faces and in the hearts of fishing families.
Casey wants to say hey to a relative, James Kieff, who’s been an oysterman for thirty-five years. “We outta work,” James says disbelievingly from the deck of his forty-eight-foot boat, Lady Jennifer, as he motors along carrying 3,000 feet of boom to the outer edge of one of the marsh islands. “Now we workin’ for BP. They don’t know these waters. We do.” A moment later he adds, “The stress is in the not knowing. Katrina came and went. We knew what to do. If the oil stays offshore, we could be okay. But that’s a big if.”
I watch him and other boats laying booms along the marshes. They work hard. I see men and women who know water, boats, and work, bending seriously to their task. And despite never having handled booms before, they do the job well.
The only problem: No one believes the booms can work. Any medium wave action will push oil over them. And despite miles and miles and miles of booms, miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of marsh remain utterly naked and undefended. It’s a fool’s errand. (During the Valdez catastrophe, Exxon’s CEO was apparently audiotaped saying he didn’t care if the booms contained the oil; he just wanted pictures of them in the water.)
The only saving grace is that there is no oil in sight yet. And that hardly helps. Because the people have no jobs after this. As always, it’s a matter of who people are at the mercy of how people are.
But for this frantic moment, with oil rigs in every direction and the oil coating everyone’s mind, it’s boom boom boom.
A Louisiana State University professor says the oil could entirely wipe out many kinds of fish, and notes, “We may very well lose dozens of vulnerable fish species.” A toxicologist says, “We’ll see dead bodies soon. Sharks, dolphins, sea turtles, whales; the impact on predators will be seen in a short time because the food web will be impacted from the bottom up.” Another Louisiana State University professor says oil pushed inland by a hurricane could affect rice and sugarcane crops. A meteorologist says there’s a chance that the oil could cause explosive deepening of hurricanes in the Gulf. The Christian Science Monitor asks whether hurricane-blown oil could make coastal towns permanently uninhabitable. The Monitor then quotes a Pensacola Beach solar energy salesman (bias alert) who took a hazardous materials class as saying, “In these classes, they basically tell you that swallowing even a small amount of the oil or getting some on your hands and then having a smoke could be deadly.”
Well, holy cow; somebody needs to warn auto mechanics, boat owners, auto-lube attendants, heating-oil delivery people, gas station attendants, and anyone with a car or lawn mower not to move because they’re about to explode!
In the Florida Keys, Miami, and beyond, people begin worrying about the “Loop Current” (vocabulary term). It flows out of the Gulf of Mexico to become the Gulf Stream, and might carry oil throughout the Keys’ reefs and then up the East Coast. “Once it’s in the Loop Current, that’s the worst case,” says a Texas A&M University oceanographer. “Then that oil could wind up along the Keys and get