A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [59]
“Everybody is so stressed here. We’re just sitting here waiting and they’re not telling us anything because they don’t know,” says a Grand Isle restaurant owner who may soon be out of business. “I had four people who came yesterday crying.” A fisherman says, “My wife cried and cried over this. Just the other night she told me, ‘Thank God there isn’t a loaded gun in this house.’ ”
In Gulf Shores, Alabama, thick oil washes up at a state park, coating the white sand with a thick, red stew. “This makes me sick,” says one resident, her legs and feet streaked with crude. “I’ve gone from owning a piece of paradise to owning a toxic waste dump.” Says a fishing guide, “I don’t want to say heartbreaking, because that’s been said. It’s a nightmare. It looks like it’s going to be wave after wave of it and nobody can stop it.”
Meanwhile, dozens of oil-drenched pelicans float around Louisiana’s Grand Terre Island. People have found more than 500 tarred-and-feathered birds dead, and have rescued about 80 oiled birds and nearly 30 mammals, including dolphins. Most showed no obvious oil; maybe something else killed them. But oil ingestion and fumes could have caused this.
The sight of animals struggling in oil moves me to tears more than once. But the numbers here are small compared with the avian toll of the Exxon Valdez. After that spill, workers immediately found more than 35,000 birds; by reasonable estimates, approximately 250,000 died. That was because of the density of the oil, the temperature of the water, and the fact that coastal Alaska is home to enormous numbers of aquatic birds of whole family types that (like sea lions) don’t live in the Gulf.
That doesn’t mean the rescue efforts are going well.
“This is the worst screwed-up response I’ve ever been on,” says Rebecca Dmytryk, who has worked with oiled birds in Louisiana, California, and Ecuador, and founded a group called WildRescue. Experienced wildlife rescuers have complained that they’ve been prevented from going out to look for live oiled birds in the most likely places, sidelined, or never called in at all. A guy with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that rescuing oiled birds is a task for “our trained biologists.” But experienced rescuers complain that the job of rescue went to inexperienced government employees—fisheries biologists, firefighters—who had never touched a bird before. “I’m just at a loss for why this was allowed,” says Lee Fox of Save Our Seabirds, who has written a manual on handling oiled birds.
Jay Holcomb of the International Bird Rescue Research Center has been saving birds from oil spills for thirty years, on three continents. During the Exxon Valdez event, he oversaw the entire bird search and rescue program in Prince William Sound, the largest ever attempted, involving dozens of boats and thousands of birds. But here, that’s not good enough for the officious officials. “We’ve been assigned to take hotline calls,” he complains, “completely kept out of it.”
BP hired a four-year-old Texas company called Wildlife Response Services to oversee the rescue and rehabilitation of birds, turtles, and any other animals hurt by the spill. Its owner says Holcomb and the other wildlife rehabilitation experts “didn’t have the personnel to go out and rescue all the birds.” She says the system she set up has worked well, adding, “I don’t know why anyone would question that.”
Four months ago, she did call Lee Fox and tell her