From the Shores of Louisiana: Jon takes to the road

by Jon Bowermaster on

From the Shores of Louisiana: Jon Bowermaster from gadling on Vimeo.

Lafayette, Louisiana — It’s a steamy, early-summer day in Southern Louisiana – expecting the “heat index” to top out today around 108 degrees F! – but it’s good to be back on the ground here. I’ve been coming every few months for the past two years, producing a documentary film, and it’s started to feel like a second-home. One with really good food … and music.

Yesterday, evidence of the impact of the oil spill came home when I went in search of an oyster po-boy. At the first couple stops, café owners apologized for not having any … a first in their lifetimes … because the oyster beds have been shut now for more than five weeks. When I finally did find one, something didn’t feel quite right, so I asked: The oysters came from … somewhere else, outside Louisiana, was all the server could offer with a shrug.

While the spill is conversation number one (with World Cup football second), I can feel a kind of creeping frustration/resignation settling in.

In Lafayette, which has more oil-industry jobs per capita than anywhere other than Midland, Texas, there’s a fair amount of rumbling in the bars and on the street corners about the deepwater drilling moratorium, with a majority believing the New Orleans’ federal judge’s decision to start up again is a good one.

There’s lots of concern about where all that oil waste is heading. A few people have brought up concerns about the health of the workers involved in the clean-up; apparently BP is against the workers wearing respirators on the job because 1) it looks bad on camera and 2) they’re afraid people with their faces covered are going to overheat and collapse.

There’s concern too that while BP appears to be saying all the right things right now in regard to its long-term commitment and willingness to pay all “legitimate” claims that six months from now, a year from now … locals will be locked in fights with the mega-company for their money.

From the Shores of Louisiana: A letter from a Louisiana fisherman

by Jon Bowermaster on

Among the many I’ve met and worked with in southern Louisiana (SoLa) these past two years, making a film about the relationship between man and the sea, no couple has impressed me more than Tracy Kuhns and Michael Roberts. Committed to family, community, and the environmental concerns of them all, they share many hats: Both work as the Louisiana Bayoukeepers. Mike is a fulltime fisherman and when he’s not fishing, a builder. Tracy runs the local Fisherman’s Association They have kids and grandkids and neighbors along the watery canals where they all keep their fishing boats tied. I shared their story with you a couple Dispatches back, from Barataria

Tracy is usually the front person; she was the one who got the Mayor of Lafitte on the phone the other day when I was visiting, haranguing him to decide if the fishery was open or not. Mike often stands in the background, especially when it comes to journalists. But he was the one who compared BP execs to terrorists, for the damage the local economy and fishing grounds that now appears will last for many, many years. Last Sunday, Mike and Tracy went out from their home on the waters leading to Barataria Bay and the Gulf to see just how bad it is. Below is an email Mike sent me after we’d visited:

The boat ride, out from Lafitte, Louisiana on Sunday to our fishing grounds was like any other I have taken in my life as a commercial fisherman from this area. I have made this same trip thousands of times in my 35 plus years of shrimping and crabbing.

A warm breeze in my face, it is a typical Louisiana summer day. Three people were with me — my wife Tracy, Ian Wren, and our grandson, Scottie. I was soon to find out just how untypical this day would become for me, not unlike a death in the family. This was going to be a very bad day for me.

As we neared Barataria Bay, the smell of crude oil in the air got thicker and thicker. The approach of the fishing grounds, an event that has always brought joy to me all of my life, was slowly turning into a nightmare. As we entered Grand Lake, the name we fishermen call Barataria Bay, I started to see a weird, glassy look to the water and soon it became evident there was oil sheen as far as I could see. Soon, we were running past patches of red oil floating on top of the water. As we headed farther south we saw at least a dozen boats, which from a distance appeared to be shrimping. But we soon realized that shrimping was not what they were doing at all; instead they were towing oil booms in a desperate attempt to corral oil that was pouring into our fishing grounds. We stopped to talk to one of the fishermen towing a boom, a young fisherman from Lafitte. What he told me floored me. “What we are seeing in the lake, the oil, was but a drop in the bucket of what was to come,” he said. He had just come out of the Gulf of Mexico and said, “It was unbelievable, and the oil runs for miles and miles and was headed for shore and into our fishing grounds. I thought what I had already seen in the lake was bad enough for a lifetime. We talked a little while longer, gave the fisherman some protective respirators, and were soon on our way. As we left the small fleet of boats working feverishly, trying to corral the oil, I became overwhelmed with what I had seen.

I am not real emotional and consider myself a pretty tough guy. You have to be to survive as a fisherman. But as I left that scene, tears flowed down my face and I cried. Something I have not done in a long time, but would do several more times this day. I tried not to let my grandson, Scottie, see me crying. I didn’t think he would understand, that I was crying for his stolen future. None of this will be the same, for decades to come. The damage is going to be immense and I do not think our lives here in South Louisiana will ever be the same. He is too young to understand. He has an intense love for our way of life here. He wants to be a fisherman and a fishing guide when he gets older. That’s all he’s ever wanted. It is what he is, it is in his soul, and it is his culture. How can I tell him that this may never come to pass now, now that everything he loves in the outdoors may soon be destroyed by this massive oil spill? How do we tell this to a generation of young people in south Louisiana who live and breathe this bayou life that they love so much, could soon be gone? How do we tell them? All this raced through my mind and I wept.

We continued farther south towards Grand Terre Island. We approached Bird Island. Its real name is Queen Bess Island, but we call it Bird Island, because it is always full of birds. It is a rookery, a nesting island for thousands of birds, pelicans, terns, gulls and more. As we got closer we saw that protective booms had been placed around about two thirds of the island. But it was obvious to me that oil had gone under the boom and was fouling the shore and had undoubtedly oiled some birds. My God. We would see this scene again at Cat Island and other unnamed islands. We continued on to the east past Coup Abel Pass and saw more shrimp boats trying to contain some of the oil on the surface. We arrived at 4 Bayou Pass to see more boats working on the same thing. We beached the boat and decided to look at the beach between the passes.

The scene was one of horror to me. There was thick red oil on the entire stretch of beach, with oil continuing to wash ashore. The water looked to be infused with red oil, with billions of what appeared to be red pebbles of oil washing up on the beach with every wave. The red oil pebbles, at the high tide mark on the beach, were melting into pools of red goo under the hot Louisiana sun. The damage was overwhelming. There was nobody there to clean it up. It would take an army to do it. Like so much of coastal Louisiana, it was accessible only by boat. Will it ever be cleaned up? I don’t know. Tears again. We soon left that beach and started to head home.

We took a little different route home, staying a little farther to the east side of Barataria Bay. As we approached the northern end of the bay, we ran into another raft of oil that appeared to be covering many square miles. It was only a mile from the interior bayous on the north side of Barataria Bay. My God. No boats were towing boom in this area. I do not think anyone even knew it was there. A little bit farther north we saw some shrimp boats with boom, on anchor, waiting to try and protect Bayou St. Dennis from the oil. I alerted them that oil was on its way. I hope they were able to control it before it reached the bayou. We left them and started towards home.

My heart never felt so heavy as on that ride in. I thought to myself, This is the most I’ve cried since I was a baby. In fact I am sure it was. This will be a summer of tears for a lot of us in south Louisiana.

JB: I spoke with Tracy after their exploration. She was no less moved:

“We are heartbroken. The oil has moved into Barataria Bay and is heading north. The southern half of our fishing grounds is closed. Seeing grown, tough men cry and knowing our grandchildren, like Scottie, who’s life and career dreams are related to bayou life, is something to hard to watch or think about. The government, whose sole purpose is to protect the health and safety of its citizens has and is continuing to fail the people. They are allowing BP to kill the Gulf of Mexico and its coastal communities. Shame on them, how can they sleep at night?”

From the shores of Louisiana: What fuels energy change?

by Jon Bowermaster on

Born in the Natal province of South Africa, Ivor van Heerden has been an adopted Louisianan for more than thirty years. During his years here he’s been head of the state’s coastal restoration program, on the staff at LSU, co-director of the state’s hurricane center and a head of Team Louisiana, which investigated the hows and whys of the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina.

Also along the way he’s been branded everything from an expert to a gadfly, an egomaniac to a Cassandra. While he predicted the damage a Katrina-like storm would have on New Orleans several years before it happened – thus his charge to investigate after the hurricane – when he came out very publicly pointing fingers at the Army Corps of Engineers for “shoddy engineering” his job at LSU was suddenly eliminated (“budget cuts” said university officials; he’s still suing to get his job back).

He’s stayed in Louisiana since he was let go from LSU more than a year ago because he’s invested so much time studying its coastline and because he truly loves the state and its wildernesses. Since the Gulf spill he’s been up and down the coastline and in the air above it, consulting with clean-up efforts.

When I find him in his gravel drive in a small town outside Baton Rouge he’s packing his car for Houma, home of one of the spill’s command centers. Despite a reputation as a nature lover he’s no fuzzy romantic and is calmly outspoken on everything from big hurricanes to big oil. He’d spent the day before on two flights over the Chandleur Islands, where oil had just come ashore.

%Gallery-95432%”This is absolutely the last thing we need, being the most important part of the year in Louisiana ecologically. Our wetlands are already in such sad shape and now we’ve got hurricane season approaching. It’s the growing season for the grasses and wetland plants that suck energy out of the surge, which help protect us from storms. And of course this is the time of year when the birds are breeding and the fish larvae are starting to enter the bays and estuaries.”

How bad was the view from the air? “It was truly impressive. Some of the slicks are huge – one we looked at was 10 miles by 2 miles, about a mile off the coast. If something like that came ashore it would be devastating.

“A worst case scenario would be that a tropical storm spins out next week and we have five, six, ten feet of surge and it drives that oil in and totally fouls a huge part of coastal Louisiana. In some ways we’re lucky it’s happening now rather than during the height of hurricane season, which is when we expected such a catastrophe to happen because a drill rig had been knocked over.”

Given his ongoing fight with LSU over his job – his request for a trial was turned down just a week ago, though he is appealing – I wonder if he might temper his outspokenness regarding assigning blame for the spill.

“Obviously BP, or Transocean are at fault since it’s their equipment that failed. Whether it was malfunction of equipment or human error, they are ultimately responsible. But we Americans share a fair amount of the blame. Most of us are in denial about the whole energy situation in this country so it is our fault as much as anyone else’s.

“But BP or Exxon or whoever else is not going to go drill in one-mile deep water if they can’t make money. It costs them billions of dollars to sink just one well. But they can make money because of our energy policy. If we could suddenly change it so that we all had solar panels on our roofs, use solar heating and so on, we would reduce the demand for this oil and it would become uneconomical to go into these deep waters and we could eliminate some of these problems. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, I honestly don’t. I think we’re just going to continue down this road until we have a major energy catastrophe when we are all of a sudden forced to change.”

From the shores of Louisiana — A conversation with Paul Templet

by Jon Bowermaster on

Baton Rouge, Louisiana – Standing in the heart of the bucolic, green LSU campus, where Paul Templet taught environmental science for more than twenty years, it’s hard to imagine that the worst ecologic disaster perhaps ever is ongoing just a couple hours away. It’s from this landmark that he took a leave of absence in the 1980s to run, for four years, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, during the reign of “the last good governor we had” (Buddy Roemer), he remembers.

He is pointed in his accusations that those years may have been the last time that real rules and regulations were forced on the oil industry. “Today they write most of them,” he says.

Retired from the university but still living in the town in which he was born and consulting on environmental and coastal concerns, Templet has nearly used up any optimism he might have once had regarding his state and environmental controls. He organized the first Earth Day event near where we are talking, forty years ago.

“Certainly I’ve lost hope that the Louisiana state government will ever change. The oil companies run this state, without question. They control most of the agencies, own most of the legislators and run the governor’s office.” His only hope is that the Deepwater spill will affect change inside the federal government agencies that have a hand in overseeing oil production and environmental protection in the Gulf. “When you’ve got such loose oversight by the Mineral Management Service and the Department of Interior, combined with endemic corruption in the state, I guess none of us are surprised by the spill.”

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Corruption and Louisiana are like oil and oil. Templet suggests that the federal government has been looking the other direction for a number of years too. “Thanks largely to the Bush-Cheney administration. Remember those secret meetings Cheney had early in the administration with oil company executives that he’d never release information about? It was during those meetings where things were decided that would help save the oil industry money. Including not requiring things like backup spill preventers.”

His biggest concerns about the spill are that while it may now seem like the worst ever, it may not be the last and that it won’t affect real change.

“The oil industry is massive in this state. I fought them for years when I was head of the DEQ and we won some battles on what they could dump and where, even radioactive waste they were just dumping into pits in the ground and covering up. But they hate rules and regulations and have ways of getting back at you.” When he returned to his professorship – which, knowing that in his job as chief environmentalists he’d make some powerful enemies, he made university officials guarantee would be waiting for him – his punishment was a pay cut.

While he loves his home state and has no plans of leaving (though he does keep an apartment in Taos) he’s saddened when he looks around at the state of his home state. “We have the biggest gas and oil industry in the lower 48 yet Louisiana ranks among the lowest in most categories. Our roads are awful, so are our schools. Our poverty level is 2nd only to Mississippi.

“The reality is we don’t get much tax money out of the oil industry anymore and most of the drilling is more than three miles offshore, thus in federal waters, so any royalties go to the fed. And the subsidies the state gives the oil industry guarantees we get very little in return for all that they take.”

He remembers from his teaching days that he and his colleagues agreed that it took at least 20 years to see true change. “Maybe in the next twenty years we’ll see a tightening up of regulations on the oil industry. But the thing we have to do is move away from oil and gas because even if we continue to find it, and burn it, we’re just making climate change worse.”

Though it’s hard to believe as oil continues to rush out of the wellhead a mile below sea level at a still-unknown rate, rising sea levels may be an even bigger concern for southern Louisiana than future oil spills. Once the coast line is erased, which many think will happen in the next thirty to forty years, pollution will mean something completely different.

“I saw a map yesterday that showed by 2050 that New Orleans would be gone (meaning about thirty miles of marsh and wetlands would be flooded),” says Templet. This in a state that loses a football field of wetlands every day due to erosion, or about 25 square miles a year.

“I’ve also heard that you can’t get a loan to build a house south of Houma because the banks don’t believe that in the thirty years it will take you to pay off your loan that the house will still be above water.”

Will the oil spill change Gulf Coast tourism?

by Grant Martin on

With the massive BP Transocean Halliburton Deep Water Horizon oil slick slowly heading for the Louisiana Gulf Coast, many are starting to wonder what the impact will be on the tourism industry. In a region already heavily reliant on Caribbean waters to sustain much of the economy, many worry that any negative effect on tourism dollars could spell disaster. And that’s why many operators are doing whatever they can to encourage visitors to come. As the All Things Considered story below details, some resorts are even offering “oil spill guarantees” to promise visitors that their vacations won’t be ruined by the disaster.

Has the oil spill affected your vacation? Will it prevent you from visiting any of the Gulf Coast region? Let us know in the comments below!

Meantime, keep up with the the spill map and beached oil locations over at the NOAA.


[Photo: Flickr | di_the_huntress]