A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [73]
Radio talk show: A guy who runs a parasailing business calls to say, “Congratulations, BP. Today you’ve accomplished something hurricanes couldn’t do, banks couldn’t do, and even the greed of Wall Street couldn’t do: you’ve put me out of business.” He has made more than eighty phone calls trying to get BP to respond to his financial claims.
Three congressional hearings today. Five yesterday.
Kevin Costner has a solution to the oil; for years he’s invested in a machine to separate oil from water. There are thousands of other people making suggestions, promoting their ideas, hawking their own products. There seems no clear route for these things to get evaluated.
Time to have another look as the frigatebird sees it. Wheels defy gravity at Belle Chasse, Louisiana, a little after 10:00 a.m.
Our twenty-four-year-old pilot is Corey Miller. Up over the marshes, we’re oil hunters once more. Soon we’re flying in and out of clouds, and this makes me nervous. Increased air traffic in the last few days has brought planes close enough to blow kisses.
The curious and the dispersant dispensers and the helicopters crowd the sky. Slip-sliding by. Up here at these speeds, gaps close fast. You want good vis. We have bad vis.
Sometimes we’re whited out for minutes. Cat-and-mouse with other planes. Corey talks to his headset constantly. Young and alert, I hope; not cocky. Seems on the ball.
A rather alarming number of wildlife biologists get raked off in small-plane crashes. Do a computer search with the words “biologist plane crash” and you’ll see what’s on my mind right now. Once, in Honduras, I was about to board a small plane to an outer island, but agreed to go later so some other people could get back to the mainland first. During their flight the engine quit, and the plane crashed into the sea and sank. Luck put them close enough to land that someone saw the plane plummet and raced to pick up survivors. But I’d planned a much longer water crossing, and if we’d done my trip first, we’d probably never have been found.
Yet right now, I’m not worried about our plane. I’m worried about other planes. Our current destination, directly above the blowout, is also of much interest to the other fliers. Corey tells me they’ve worked out altitude separations for the different aircraft. I tell him good, thanks. I gaze down, and think of home.
Headed to 3,500 feet, for safety’s sake. A little high for seeing details well, but you see more if you’re alive. The clouds let us play peeka-boo with the ocean. They also cast Rorschach-test shadows. We see: barges, boats. Oil rigs, of course. Muddy troughs of river water slinking seaward, soils of the Great Plains, carrying their fertilizers and pesticides, maintaining the Gulf’s chronic illness. Like I said: problems besides petroleum.
The shimmering sea pea green now. The engine noise. When we open a side window for photos, the flapping wind.
Shrimp boats continue towing boom through thick and thin oil with no significant effect on it. Most oil spills over their U of boom. Slicks greet the boats’ bows, slicks are their wake. They’ve been wasting time like this for weeks now.
We apply more altitude to defeat the thickening clouds. A worse and safer view of a sea streaked widely with oil. The sea keeps appearing and disappearing, blue sky appears and disappears. The one constant: oil.
Miles and miles of streaks, tendrils, fingers. Oil coats the ocean brick orange. Brown. Differing densities under varying light. Miles, miles, miles.
With his small camera, Corey is taking pictures. I remember being twenty-four. So will he.
At 11:30 we’re flying ellipses over ground zero. The clouds break nicely, revealing a couple of dozen ships. Ships large and smaller. The relief well drillers. The flare of burning gas. Choppers touch ships’ helipads like dragonflies grasp reeds.
The blue water looks like mere cracks between heavy brown billows