A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [93]
A felony? Impossible. Can the Coast Guard make a law? But it’s true. Here is their press release:
June 30, 2010 16:51:40 CST
Coast Guard establishes 20-meter safety zone around all Deepwater Horizon protective boom operations taking place in Southeast Louisiana.
The Captains of the Port for Morgan City, La., New Orleans, La., and Mobile, Ala., under the authority of the Ports and Waterways Safety Act, has [sic] established a 20-meter safety zone surrounding all Deepwater Horizon booming operations and oil response efforts.
Vessels must not come within 20 meters of booming operations, boom, or oil spill response operations under penalty of law.…
Violation of a safety zone can result in up to a $40,000 civil penalty. Willful violations may result in a class D felony.
This, after weeks of people screaming for transparency and complaining about interference and petty bullying by people getting paid by BP. When I do a Google search with the words “media access Gulf oil,” I find plenty of other people complaining. One Web commentator says, “Never in my lifetime could I imagine that a foreign company could dictate my ability to move freely and openly in American territorial waters.”
America should be able to show that in a crisis we are at our finest, our most American. But wow. I can barely contain the rage I feel at the Coast Guard and its Thadmiral.
The highway to Venice, Louisiana, is sixty miles of levee sandwich, a corridor of road between corridors of water. Heavy shipping lanes gouged through wetlands. Dying trees in subsiding marshes. Herons. Cormorants. A least bittern; nice bird. They’re all nice. Egrets still immaculately white, offering the hope of the living even as they feel the squeeze.
Captain Jeff Wolkart is telling me, “Two weeks into the spill, we were at Pelican Island fishing under birds in about five feet of water, which is a common way of fishing this time of year. And a dolphin kept coming around. Its body was covered in that brownish oil, that tannish-colored crude. And he was trying to blow out his blowhole, and he was struggling. Porpoises scare fish, so I moved off a hundred yards. It followed. I kept doing that and it kept coming back, coming to us, hanging right alongside the boat. That’s very unusual. They’re pretty intelligent, and it seemed to want help. But eventually I had to leave.”
Dawn. Helicopters soon join the gulls. The drone of engines is as incessant as the industries of swallows that affix their nests to the I-beams of waterfront warehouses.
The media invasion is pulling away, leaving a low-level occupation. So many were they—many of them urban northerners—that the dockside burger-and-fries joint I’m in was compelled to add a “healthy platter.” BP, its contractors, its security guards, and more than a few sheriffs understand the media as spies, prying eyes for a public prone to unwieldy concern if well informed.
The watermen seem a bit severed by the constant traffic of contractor vans and trucks and the private guards. It’s not their place anymore. How are they finding the strength?
Here’s how: all the watermen are choosing to work for BP. There’s money now, work moving stuff, bringing stuff, towing stuff. Two grand a day. For now. After that, they don’t know.
Charter captains meeting: fishermen—former fishermen, for now. A young man, twenties, asks, “Where will I take my kids fishing?” He has no kids yet. I hope he becomes CEO of an oil company. They could use his concern for kids.
All these guys know what it was like a couple of months ago, before the Big Problem. Few know, as the head of this association knows, what it was like way back. “You young guys, you’ll never see it like me and Billy saw it,” he says. I follow his eyes to where Billy’s gray hair flows from under a baseball cap. “The place is a small fraction of what it was. It’s infinitesimal compared to what it was.”
The place