A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [70]
Tommy was born here. Cody, from Tennessee, came for the fishing.
Tommy shrimped for twenty-five years. “Hard work, the open Gulf is. You’re up three days straight, takin’ heads off shrimp. You’re just sittin’ there poppin’ heads, packin’ anywheres from ten to twenty boxes a day.” A box is one hundred pounds. How many shrimp? “Depends on what sizes you’re catchin’. You get anywhere from forty-fifties to ten-fifteens. That’s how many to make a pound.” About the Oil: “I ain’t no scientist or anything like that, but I don’t think it’s gonna be okay in a year. It’ll be years, prob’ly. That’s just my opinion. It’ll be parked a long time there.”
“That’s too scary to think about,” Cody says. “I depend on these coming two months for a large portion of my living.”
Let’s reminisce: “Best snapper fishin’ in the world, right off our coast,” Cody proudly crows. “Red snapper’s our bread and butter. They average five to ten pounds. We also catch vermillion snapper, triggerfish, grouper, amberjack—”
Enough reminiscing. What does he think of the booms and stuff? “A waste of time.”
Our boat rocks and growls forward. Our boat is slow and loud. Its noise helps cancel my thoughts. A good thing here, not thinking is. Not thinking about how much I always loved being at sea.
Cody spots a loggerhead turtle that seems fine. It dives. A helicopter passes.
Cody says that a few days ago, there was a slick here that ran for miles. Not here now. It’s a stealthy adversary.
Our boat scratches the sea, and on the breeze a whiff of hydrocarbons. Scratch and sniff. Twenty miles into the Gulf we enter a wide mosaic of mazelike slicks freckled with blobs of crude. In the beating heat of the sun, each blob bleeds its own mini-slick into the overall sheen, like pats of butter melting in a skillet.
Under that buttery petroleum coating I am surprised to see small living fishes. I am surprised to see fish alive in the ocean. A few flyingfish leap through the oil. I wonder how long they can last. Surely they ingest it. Surely their gills are getting gummed. More little tunny chase the small fish in a froth of white explosions that slice the rainbow sheen to ribbons. Life as always, the eternal sea, now with a twist: Can it last, can it stand it? I can’t.
Cody says last week, seven miles from shore, he saw oil blobs the size of cars. He was out for opening day of a fifty-seven-day red snapper season. It lasted two days before the government closed the waters.
Heavy lines of crude like ten-foot anacondas, like cobras with hoods spread, for miles now. And snake oil on the breeze.
Cody says, “It was just an accident. You know, we gotta have that oil. It’s a necessary evil.”
LATE JUNE
In a rather extraordinary breaking of ranks during a congressional hearing on June 15, oil executives distance themselves from BP. “We would not have drilled the well the way they did,” says ExxonMobil’s CEO. Chevron’s chief says, “It certainly appears that not all the standards that we would recommend or that we would employ were in place.” Shell’s CEO: “It’s not a well that we would have drilled in that mechanical setup.” In a seemingly sincere apology, BP’s chairman says, “This tragic accident should never have happened.” Then he manages to offend everyone in the Gulf region by adding, “We care about the small people.”
And all across the Gulf, tongues flicker with phrases like “They’re no greater than us,” “We don’t bow down to them,” and “We’re human beings.”
Big People, small people. How sad.
On June 16, a new and improved containment system hooked directly into the blowout preventer begins carrying 5,000 to 10,000 additional barrels per day to another vessel called the Q4000, which has no storage capacity and wastefully burns off all that oil and gas. By late June they’re either taking or flaring off as much as 25,000 barrels of oil daily. But plenty of oil continues billowing into the sea throughout all this. A third vessel, the Helix