I have worked and lived with the people of the bayou in Buras, LA, for the past six months. But when the BP well from hell was capped in mid-July, the media ran for the exits as fast as they stormed the bayous in early May. They've barely looked back.
But unfortunately the oil did not go away. Oily sheen and tar balls still wash in with the tides, still pop up on the surface, and still threatens the livelihood of a culture that is disappearing with the sea-flooded marshes. Recently, I took a freezing boat ride out to the coast of the Mississippi delta and found tar balls still littering the beaches. According to cleanup workers out there, there's a constant wave of these weathered oil pieces washing in. They didn't expect it to go away anytime soon. Truth is, no one knows how much oil is buried on the ocean floor, sunk by chemical dispersants and rising slowly like a poisonous Phoenix.
Watch a slideshow of NRDC photos from the Gulf since early May.
Last week President Obama’s Oil Spill Commission issued its final report. It was well received by many residents of the Gulf, but people in the region still have huge health concerns as they deal a variety of physical and mental health ailments they say are tied to the oil and the two million gallons of chemical dispersants sprayed throughout the Gulf. This was topic number one raised by the public at President Obama's oil commission forum in New Orleans last week, a day after it issued its final report. Commissioners Frances Beinecke and Don Boesch heard an earful from coastal residents who have had enough of the government’s inaction and dismissive attitude. They promised to bring their complaints back to the president.
Cherri Foytlin of Gulf Change, a community organization based in Grand Isle, LA, gave an empassioned plea for help.
“Today I’m talking to you about my life. My ethylbenzene levels are 2.5 times the 95th percentile, and there’s a very good chance now that I won’t get to see my grandbabies…What I’m asking you to do now, if possible, is to amend [your report]. Because we have got to get some health care. I have seen small children with lesions all over their bodies. We are very, very ill. And dead is dead. So it really doesn’t matter if the media comes back… or the President hears us, or… if the oil workers and the fishermen and the crabbers get to feed their babies and maybe have a good Christmas next year… Dead is dead…I know your job is probably already done, but I’d like to hire you if you don’t mind. And God knows I can’t pay you. But I need your heart. And I need your voice. And I need you to come to that table. And I need you to insist that Feinberg and anybody else that needs to be in on that conversation comes too. And I’m asking you that today.
And I would like you to say yes to me today. While you look me in the eye, please say yes you’ll come to my table.”


Latosha Brown, director of the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal and Ecological Health, said this is a story her organization has heard repeatedly. “The key concern expressed by the community in response to the report is the overwhelming need for access to health care. Over and over, people exposed to crude and dispersants from the drilling disaster told stories of serious health issues--from high levels of ethylbenzene in their blood, to respiratory ailments and internal bleeding—and expressed an urgent need for access to doctors who have experience treating chemical exposure.”
So where's the press been on this? Except for a few independent reporters like Dahr Jamail, they've been mostly asleep at the wheel. While the federal government plans a five-year health study, residents say they don't have time to wait. Medical experts are in short supply down in the bayous and along coastal communities that have borne the brunt of exposure to the toxic soup that invaded their shores. "They can study all they want," says Venice, LA, community health advocate Kindra Arnesen. "People here need medical help now. By the time the government gets around to doing any study, it will be too late."
I've put a short list of questions Gulf residents are asking that are not well known by the rest of the country. They are important questions that the media needs to ask in its role as government watchdog and voice of the disenfranchised. It's a role that desperately needs to be filled.
Q. The economic impact of the BP disaster has hit the fisherman community especially hard, as their livelihood has been severely threatened. Many of these fishermen are subsistence fishermen who don’t keep meticulous records of their catch. How are they being compensated if they can’t provide adequate records? What safety net is there for people who have fallen through the cracks or have improperly been denied claims?
Q. Many cleanup workers complained of illnesses and sickness after working on oil cleanup last summer. Some were hospitalized. Some workers complain they were let go and still have medical issues, yet can’t get compensation for their medical bills. Who is responsible and how can cleanup workers, many of them former fishermen, be compensated and treated properly?
Q. The FDA and the EPA have been reluctant to share all government test data with independent scientists. Some independent scientists are reporting higher levels of oil contaminants in seafood tests and in sediments, some at alarming levels. How can the government continue to insist the seafood is safe when independent tests are showing these discrepancies?
Q. Minority communities such as Native American fishermen, Vietnamese shrimpers and African American oystermen have been hit especially hard, since they are not well plugged into the complicated claims process due to lack of education and professional assistance. Unemployment rates in some of these fishing communities is at 80%. These communities have few other options than fishing and living off the land as they have for generations. What has the government and BP done to reach out and help support these communities as they wait for their fishing business to return to normal?
Q. Shrimpers, oystermen and crab fishermen have reported oily substances turning up in some of their catches. Yet the government has only closed one area to one kind of fishing (royal red shrimp) when tar balls turned up in fishing nets. Many fishermen believe the oil is sitting on the bottom and will contaminate migrating bottom feeders such as shrimp. If these anecdotal reports of oil in seafood catches are true, why isn’t there more attention paid to them?
Q. The oil disaster has shined a spotlight on the Gulf marsh region that is rapidly disappearing. A huge amount of money is now being appropriated for Gulf restoration. Yet the political forces against restoring the marshes are still firmly in place: ship navigation up the Mississippi River; oyster fishermen who fight again increased fresh water flow; developers who stand in the way of restoration projects; etc. How is this restoration effort any different from the rest?
Q. Residents and cleanup workers continue to complain that chemical dispersants are being sprayed or used at night. Some Gulf coast activists claim Corexit compounds are still turning up in the water, and Corexit containers of dispersants were seen in dock areas long after the government and BP said they stopped using it. How can BP assure the public that its cleanup contractors are not continuing to use dispersants?
Q. After the Exxon Valdez disaster, research showed that over a period of years many communities were torn apart by social stresses, including increased divorce rates, mental health issues, crime rates and school dropouts. In areas hit hard by the oil disaster in the bayous, there is evidence this is starting to happen. What are government and social service groups doing about this problem and is BP paying for any of this?
A version of this blog first appeared on the Neiman Watchdog website
As for my being "ignorant," I don't know your history, but I was born and raised in Louisiana and have lived in south Louisiana during most of my adult life. I've visited places all along the northern Gulf Coast regularly and often for nearly sixty years. I've fished and sailed and swam and just generally loved the Gulf since early childhood. So don't tell me "Come on down."
BTW, I eat also eat Gulf seafood, especially shrimp, my favorite, at every opportunity, fried, etoufee, boiled, N.O. "barbecue" style, or however you like it, even stuffed.
http://www.thenation.com/article/157723/search-bps-oil?page=0,0
"Back at the university lab, John Paul, a professor of biological oceanography, introduced healthy bacteria and phytoplankton to those water samples and watched what happened. What he found shocked him. In water from almost half of the locations, the responses of the organisms "were genotoxic or mutagenic"—which means the oil and dispersants were not only toxic to these organisms but caused changes to their genetic makeup. Changes like these could manifest in a number of ways: tumors and cancers, inability to reproduce, a general weakness that would make these organisms more susceptible to prey—or something way weirder."
Funny how the fishermen who have been cheating on their taxes and underreporting catches, which harms other taxpayers and fouls up fishery management programs with false data, now want to cry for more benefits. They are basically cheaters just want to cheat some more.
Funny how the people who are worried about the dispersents that were used by BP, then use "Simple Green" to cut grease around their houses. After all "Simple Green" is green and that makes it good - right?.
Funny how we are so concerned about the possibility of some oil in the sediment impacting the biology on the ocean bottom when the shrimp trawlers clear-cut the whole area every year and kill everything on the bottom larger than a few inches in size including turtles and young fish. I guess their destruction of the bottom is cultural tradition that must be protected.
Funny how the dead turtles analyzed showed they died from being in shrimp nets illegally operating without a TED (turtle exclusion device), not BP oil.
Facts are a problem.
What I do care about is the FACT that people are dying, emotionally and physically. I do care that the crab larvae (a foundation for the aquatic food chain) contain oil droplets and my god, if I have to wonder about the Tuna I consume because of mercury content, I will not ignore the implications of Lymphadenitis and systemic toxicity. The micro to the macro is what matters, not your extremities and justifications regurgitated.
Eighty percent unemployment isn't a "funny" thing.
Where is your evidence that even a single person has died from this spill since the original explosion on the rig?
Given that tens of millions of gallons of oil seep naturally into the Gulf every year, what is your evidence that "oil droplets" found under the shells (and shed with those shells) of crab larvae constitute any new or dangerous threat?
Staph infections are caused by bacteria that have no relation to oil or oil products. They are present almost wherever humans are, on the skin and in the nose, and sometimes lead to infections, occasionally serious or even fatal. This was true long before the BP spill.
Your mention of the Alabama marine resources director in this connection borders on duplicitous. The man died in the hospital three days after receiving a knee replacement. Hospitals are notorious for the relative frequency of staph infections, especially among surgery patients. There is not the slightest evidence that this man's infection and death had any connection at all to the oil spill.
Your whole thinking seems to be classic post hoc ergo propter hoc. Because one thing preceded another thing, the first thing must have caused the second. Sure, some people who live along the Gulf Coast have become ill since the spill. Hundreds of thousands of people live on or near that coast. Nearly fifty thousand people were cleanup workers on the spill. In populations of that size, some people will get sick and some will die within six months, a year, ten years. Any actuary can tell you this. The fact that someone was near the Gulf this summer and got sick later proves absolutely nothing.
That's what the Press is supposed to be FOR. . .
The First Amendment was not devised to protect (ahem...) "CNN."
To provide a platform for advertising
To offer abysmal "entertainment"
To serve as the conduit for managed propaganda given them in press releases for public consumption
Yeah, right. Better. Neither he nor you are clueful about swamps or marshes.
The current federal government administration couldn't move fast enough to claim all is well in the Gulf - millions of gallons of oil disappeared overnight apparently in the Black Hole of corruption and profits. The true real cost of an environmental disaster is always underestimated by authorities and businesses and guess who pays in quality of life and health?
"Residents and cleanup workers continue to complain that chemical dispersants are being sprayed or used at night. Some Gulf coast activists claim Corexit compounds are still turning up in the water, and Corexit containers of dispersants were seen in dock areas long after the government and BP said they stopped using it. How can BP assure the public that its cleanup contractors are not continuing to use dispersants?"
Isn't there one real investigative journalist left in the US?
This is the kind of story that investigative journalists used to salivate over. If proven, it could be a star-maker of an expose'. Corporate tentacles may reach farther than they seem to.
Bacteria did most of the work eliminating the oil. The comments about disappearing are real. That is real science even if it isn't what you want to hear.
FYI: 1) The president "took note of" the crisis from day one. 2) Neither the president nor the EPA "ordered" BP not to use Corexit. The EPA required BP to furnish reasons for using this dispersant rather than others. BP furnished its reasons. End of story. 3) The president never said that the oil was "just disappearing on its own." He presented NOAA's preliminary report, which dealt with burning, skimming, bacterial consumption, shore cleanup, volatile evaporation, and other factors and still left something like a billion gallons of oil in the environment. 4) If you think that a minimum outlay of $20 billion is no cause for BP "to be concerned" or that this represents the company doing "as it pleases," I strongly suggest that your future lies somewhere other than in the world of corporate enterprise.
1) are the workers that helped clean up this mess safe, or will they all die young like those that helped clean up Valdez. Most workers from the valdez spill are dying by 50 do to the chemicals used, the same ones used in the gulf. I was there with 2 friends, 2 of the 3 of us have cancer.
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/june302010/oil-lifespans.php
2) what are the long term effects of these poisons in our drinking water and ground soil.
3) what have we changed to prevent a re-occurence.
4) Will our press be forthright about the health concerns of the clean up workers or will they choose not to discuss it like Valdez.
My service to this country started at 18 when I jioned uncle sams misguided children.
Have you served this country in any capacity other than critic?
We're still oil-reliant. But, that doesn't have to last forever. I say invest mental and financial energies in making petroleum obsolete, and it'll give people one less thing to fight about. It brought us this far, but now the entire situation's just gotten so retarded, that we need to evolve, adapt, and make use of science to our best benefit rather than just continuing to do what we've always done.
Where does natural gas come from? While it produces less carbon dioxide per unit mass or unit energy generated, it's obtained by drilling.
If you want renewable fuel, you're going to have to go for making stuff from algae.