A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [87]
Despite the judge’s ruling, BP stock drops 2.7 percent. The better bet: shrimp. Imported shrimp prices are up 13 percent, and Thai shrimp import poundage is up 37 percent. And Gulf shrimp prices have gone jumbo, up a whopping 43 percent. About 60 to 70 percent of oysters eaten in the United States come from the Gulf, and oysters now cost about 40 percent more, too.
On June 23 the feds reopen fishing over more than 8,000 square miles. Their reason: “because no oil has been observed there.” So why’d they close it? Other parts of the Gulf with no observed oil were never closed. Still closed: roughly 75,000 square miles, about 32.5 percent of the Gulf’s federal waters. Their smiley face: “That leaves more than two-thirds of the Gulf’s federal waters available for fishing.” People have now found more than 500 sea turtles dead or dying around the Gulf.
During the last days of June, Tropical Storm Alex thickens the air with sheets of rain that pound so heavily on my car that several times, unable to see, I have to pull over. Seven- to ten-foot seas lash the coast. Beach cleanup is halted, most work disrupted, most people scurrying for shore; hundreds of vessels steam for ports. Waves are pushing most booms ashore. Movement of the surface oil accelerates; winds push the crude turds northwest, toward heretofore oil-unsoiled Texas beaches.
Thad Allen says the weather could suspend operations for two weeks. It “would be the first time and there is no playbook,” he says with dramatic flourish. No playbook because the BP Gulf plan mentions walruses, but doesn’t mention tropical storms or hurricanes.
One of the bigger worries: if they have to make the capture vessels disconnect from their supply lines, all that oil just resumes leaking full-on into the sea. Upgraded to a hurricane, Alex is the strongest June storm since 1966, with sustained winds of more than one hundred miles an hour. But its main winds pass wide of ground zero, and the rigs stay connected. The winds, though, splatter oil onto the beaches of South Padre Island, Texas, and Galveston.
On June 30, 2010, every Republican in the House of Representatives votes no on a bill that would require corporations to disclose the money they give to American elections.
Also on June 30, Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen becomes retired Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen. He joins the Department of Homeland Security and will continue managing the federal oil spill response.
Meanwhile, the widows of workers killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosions are being told that Transocean plans to argue that its liability for damages owed is limited by the Death on the High Seas Act and the Jones Act. Shelley Anderson, whose husband, Jason, was a tool pusher on the rig, says, “Why would the damages to a family be different if a death occurs on the ocean as opposed to on land?” Well, Ms. Anderson, it’s not that the damage to your family is different. It’s just that, having caused your husband’s death, the corporation doesn’t want to pay you. That’s just the kind of people their executives are. Remember, no belly button; they’ve got their wallets in their chest pockets, where their hearts should be, and are bereft of pulse.
In the true heart of the delta, what land there is lies like giant snakes resting in shallow water, each snake just wide enough for a road, a few docks, some homes. That’s all. The people and communities seem as aquatic as muskrats.
Things have changed in the last two months. When I first came, people were in shock. Now most people have worn a slight groove in their situation.
The first place I’d visited was Shell Beach, Louisiana. So now I’m going back. This time I have a little company for a change. Mandy Moore works for the National Wildlife Federation. Blond, twenty-nine,