From the shores of Louisiana: The oil spill’s effect on fishing

by Jon Bowermaster on

Barataria, Louisiana – It is the perfect blue-sky, humidity-less spring day in bayou country that makes you feel like everything should be all right in the world. The intercoastal waterway leading to the Gulf of Mexico is calm, the canals that host fishing boats behind each neat suburban home reflect the midday sun and a cool breeze washes away extraneous sounds and smells.

But despite the bucolic day, fisherman Mike Roberts is angry. “Osama bin Laden couldn’t have done a better job of destroying a part of the American economy. This oil spill? It’s like the ultimate act of terrorism. And these guys …” – BP and Transocean executives, and the federal agency that was supposed to police them but appears to have been very cozy with the oil industry (Mineral Management Service) – “should be treated like terrorists.”

As we talk, a leftover shrimp lasagna heating in the oven, we watch soundless oil company heads testifying before Congress on headline news. Mike, and his wife Tracy Kuhns, glimpse at the television as we talk. Their house, a pair of fishing boats tied up on the canal just feet from the backdoor, is a hub this morning for neighbors, friends and relatives looking for information. When this fishing community went to bed last night they thought they were going to be able to shrimp today in the fresh waters of the bayou. But they woke to learn that all fishing along the coast had been shut down.

Tracy Kuhns never imagined a future as an environmental activist. A native of Louisiana, she was living and going to college in Texas – already a young mother – when she discovered the reason the neighborhood kids, and herself, were getting rashes and constantly sick was because they were living next door to a chemical plant’s waste pit. Six years after she began fighting, the area was declared a Superfund site, the houses in her neighborhood were razed, and she moved back to Louisiana.

%Gallery-95432%Once back home in bayou country, married to Mike, she found it impossible to look the other way when she saws signs of trouble in her new backyard. When her fishermen neighbors started bringing back stories from the nearby fishing grounds of pollution left behind by oil and gas companies who’d come in, exploited and left – leaving spills, pipelines and infrastructure behind, fouling the estuaries – she had to get involved. Joined by her husband Mike Roberts today they are the official Louisiana Bayoukeepers and she also works with the local Fisherman’s Association in Barataria, counseling on everything from health insurance to, now, recovering from the loss of income due to the oil spill.

“They have got to make up their mind,” says Mike, who put hundreds of dollars he doesn’t have into gasoline for his boat the day before and filled the on-board ice chests to the brim. “I just wasted that money.” They had just come from town hall, where fishermen had gathered for news from the mayor’s office. “I’m surprised there wasn’t a fist fight.”

Tracy wears multiple hats, as the Louisiana Bayoukeeper – affiliated with the international Waterkeeper Alliance – that monitors the environmental health of local waterways. She also looks after the Jefferson Parish Association of Family Fishermen, which has meant her living room in recent days has hosted a non-stop line of fishermen with questions. As we talk she helps an old friend, a fishermen for 40 of his 57 years, fill out the forms necessary to get his boat in line to help skim oil. “They’re going to put your boat to the top of the list,” jokes Mike, “because you got that Karaoke machine. I’m serious, he does! He gets out there fishing and just cranks it up and sings all day long.”

As Tracy and her neighbor wade through the multi-page form, she cautions him, “If you do go out there, I’m going to give you gloves, rubber sleeves, and a respirator with replaceable filters. Initially they were sending people out with nothing, no preparation, and they were coming back covered with oil after spending a day trying to scoop it up and breathing it in. We don’t want you getting sick on top of losing your jobs.”

The economic hit caused by the spill has stunned this community, its ripples being felt already. Most of these fishermen live month to month and this would normally be the middle of their biggest season of the year. On a typical mid-May day, the canal leading to the Gulf would be filled with boats; today the only movement is crab men returning from having collected their empty traps.

“I don’t know how we, or anyone here, is going to make it,” says Tracy. In one of many ironies, some of her neighbors are just now getting checks from the federal government for loss of livelihood because of Hurricane Katrina. “And those checks come with the condition that the money cannot be spent on your mortgage or food or bills, that it has to be spent on your ‘business,’ which for these guys is their boat or supplies for fishing. But if they’re not fishing … what are they supposed to do with the money?”

Each of the fishermen she counsels gets the same advice about protective gear and she walks them through a petition the fishermen’s group is preparing to make sure that any federal or state payments of support while the fishery is closed due to the spill is made in timely fashion. “We can’t wait years for help, they are going to need it right away.”

Along these quiet canals and across southern Louisiana the impact of the closed fishing grounds is already being felt. The seafood processing plants that line the intercoastal are shut; boat repair shops and supply stores are not bothering to open; in New Orleans, restaurants are scratching shrimp off menus (despite that they have shrimp in some cases, but worried buyers aren’t buying, wrongly afraid the seafood on hand is already dirty). At Veleo’s, a restaurant across the intercoastal in Lafitte the owner admits he’s stocking up with frozen fish.

Mike and Tracy have a handful of kids, one daughter lives across the street; none are in the fishing business. “We’ve got one grandson who insists he wants to be a charter fishermen,” says Mike, “But he’s only twelve years old. I don’t think that’s going to be an option for him.”

Just after noon their cell phones start buzzing. Apparently the governor has signed a waiver re-opening shrimping in Region 2, their fishing grounds.

“C’mon,” says Mike, “they’ve got to quit jerking us around. Open. Closed. Open. Closed.” But he jumps on the phone, alerting neighbors who may not have heard the news and hustling his crew back to the boat. Within the hour they’ll head out for a 24-to-48 hours run. It’s the height of a young shrimping season and if they’re able to bring back a $5,000 haul, it could be the last income from fishing they see for months, or years.

“I’m trying not to be overly pessimistic,” says Tracy, as Mike scoops steaming shrimp lasagna into bowls, “but given what we’re hearing about the mess out there I really don’t see fishing coming back.” A neighbor had made the thirty-mile motor out to the Gulf the day before to see the spill up-close and reported back that “you could run for four hours at top speed and you’d never get clear of it.” And a mile below the surface, the well just keeps pumping.

“We’re used to spills around here, but usually they’re small and you won’t be able to fish in that area for a couple years. This is something totally different. This is something they (the oil company) can’t control and it’s just heartbreaking and infuriating.

“What they’ve done here is wiped out these coastal communities. We have no idea what kind of impact it’s going to have over the long term, but we know right now it has essentially put us all out of business — the marinas, the charter captains, the commercial fishermen, nobody can do anything.

Like many fishermen along the Gulf coast Tracy is very worried that fishing as we know it along the Louisiana coast may be finished. For good. “I’m not a biologist, I’m not a scientist, but I know that if you kill off all your little marine creatures, even the bacteria and the algae that they eat, then how do you restore that stock? Even if you are able to clean it up, if the sediment covers all the oil and hides it, how do you recover everything that you’ve lost?

“The federal government has allowed this to happen by relaxing the regulations on the oil companies. Because if they’d kept those regulations in place, which would have forced them to spend that extra $500,000 (on mandatory blowout preventers) out of their billions in profit that they make every few months, this probably wouldn’t have happened. And we wouldn’t be faced with billions and billions dollars of of damage to our resources, our communities and our social structure

Since is mostly worried about her neighbors, many of whom are turning to her for advise. “They are angry and they are scared. Everybody is shell-shocked, nobody knows what to do.If there had been booms available everyone of these guys would have jumped out and started boomin’ that oil … they are desperate to try and do something to save this place they love.”

From the shores of Louisiana: Inside the Atchafalaya water basin

by Jon Bowermaster on

Dean Wilson guns the outboard engine on his snub-nosed, 17-foot aluminum bateaux through thick water hyacinth. We are in the heart of the 1.4 million acre Atchafalaya water basin which is both his backyard and his preserve – he is its formal “keeper” – when I ask if he has ever in 20 years gotten lost in this maze of narrow channels and floating forests:

“Not lost, but one time I did have my boat break down. And I was in a place that only one man alive could find me. Luckily my cell phone worked and he was just leaving the house. Otherwise, I always know where I am.” Good thing, since there’s no way we could walk out of this morass of thigh-deep water.

We spend the morning racing at full-speed up the man-made canals – dug by oil companies to give them access to the abundance of natural gas that lies beneath – his one-year-old puppy Shanka standing on the side of the boat, or becalmed in the heart of an old-growth Cyprus forest admiring the hundreds-year-old trees and wildlife that uses them for homes. Barn owls hoot in the near-distance. The gentle swoosh of wings — herons, egrets and ibis — break the calm air. The occasional four-foot alligator slides off a downed tree or mud bank. And fish, mullets, leap out of the brown-but-clear water.

“Why do they jump?” I ask Dean.

“I’m not sure,” he answers, in an accent that is part Cajun, part native Spanish. “Because they are happy?”

%Gallery-95432%Dean came to live on the edge of the swamp 20 years ago. “I wanted to go live in the Amazon, and in preparation looked for a similar place to acclimatize, so I moved here. And I never left, never made it to Brazil.” Part Spanish (his mother), part Ohioan (his father), he fit perfectly into the patchwork populace of South Louisiana. Initially he lived on the banks of the swamp, first in a tent, then a trailer, living off what he could catch by hand, hook, arrow or spear, including fish, raccoon, mink, otter, duck. Moving into a small house surrounded by swamp he made his living as a commercial fisherman and hunter for 16 years before his passion – protecting the swamp, particularly its Cyprus forests – became his livelihood. For the last five years he’s been the official Atchafalaya Basin Keeper, associated with the 200 water watchdogs operating under the umbrella of the Waterkeepers Alliance.

Other than the oil and gas companies that covet any access they can get to the oil and gas rich swamp land, his biggest enemy were clear-cutters making their way into the swamp to take the protected, hundreds-year-old Cyprus trees to turn into garden mulch. Several years of investigation, which included sneaking around the swamps in camouflage, sneaking into lumber yards and lots of aerial photography, helped him force the hand of the big box stores – specifically Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and Home Depot, which were selling the illegally-gotten mulch – into stopping. Today taking trees from the swamps in Louisiana is limited to a small corner on the eastern edge, away from the Atchafalaya. His efforts are not always lauded; he’s been followed, shot at, had a dog poisoned.

“I still follow my share of trucks loaded with trees,” he admits, “so occasionally it still happens. But it’s much better than it was.”

Why protect a place most people consider God-forsaken, a region believed (wrongly!) to be home to only melon-sized mosquitoes and poisonous snakes? “Actually, I believe this is where God resides, in the heart of the swamp,” he says.

From the shores of Louisiana: through the eyes of an environmental chemist

by Jon Bowermaster on

New Iberia, Louisiana — Traveling around southern Louisiana with Wilma Subra can be both enlightening and depressing. A chemist by training and environmental activist by choice, on every corner, at every railroad crossing, each empty lot and even in the air she sees – rightfully! – either a toxic wasteland or one on the verge. Better than anyone in the state she understands the long-term effects of putting chemicals into air and water.

During the past five-plus weeks her limits as both environmentalist and human have been tested on a variety of fronts. She’s appeared before dozens of community groups trying to explain the health risks of the spill, been interviewed by journalists from around the world, participated in high-level talks with government officials, all with the goal of trying to help them understand just how bad the ongoing spill is for both the environment and human health.

When I find her at home on a Sunday she is clearly happy to see an old friend, but exhausted from more than 35 long days and sleepless nights. Sixty-six years old, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius grant a decade ago for her work on community environmental fights.

“You never get used to this level of emergency. When you come home at night you can’t separate the science from the social impact on these communities.

“But you take it day to day. You get up in the morning and start again, no matter how many hours of sleep you get. Because so much of what I can do helps those communities … so I need to be there when they need me. And right now they desperately need me.”

When the Deepwater first exploded she was as caught by surprise as most in Louisiana. “We always suspected something like this could happen, but assumed there would be enough preventive measures that it wouldn’t turn into something this major . We could never have predicted something this huge.

%Gallery-95432%”When the rig sank, on Earth Day, it quickly became clear the spill was going to wreak havoc all along the coast. How bad is it? It’s just unbelievably bad. Decisions are being made now – the burning of oil off the surface, the spreading of chemical dispersements – that will have huge, long-term impacts. And not just on the marine environment.

According to Wilma a combination of heavy winds and high seas whip the floating oil into an aerosol of hydrocarbons, which when blown ashore are making people as far inland as New Orleans very sick, complaining of headaches, vomiting, rashes and burning eyes.

Her immediate concern post-spill was the health of the fishermen being hired to help with the clean up. “At first BP tried to get them to sign an agreement which basically took away all their rights to protection of human health, their rights to sue, their rights to get damages. They were basically saying ‘If you are going to apply for damages then you can’t apply for this job.’ So we took them to court and got all of those clauses thrown out. The following day we took them to court again because they weren’t providing the fishermen with protective gear. We’d taken it upon ourselves to give the fishermen respirators with replaceable, organic cartridges, goggles, gloves and rubber sleeves protectors because when you pick up a boom covered with oil you get it on your skin. But we wanted BP to provide it to all their workers out there.

“We don’t want the fishers, glad to get the job, to go out there and get poisoned and for the rest of their lives have human health issues because they desperately needed this job to take the place of the fishing jobs they lost because of the spill.” She likens it to the workers who helped clean up after the World Trade Center collapsed and later got sick from the toxins in the air.

I ask who she blames for the mess. “You have to start by looking at who’s in charge. And apparently BP is in charge. The MMS, EPA, Department of Interior are all saying ‘We are at the command center, we’re making decisions,’ but the truth is if BP wants to try something or not try something no one can tell them no. BP is running the show and the people along the coast are the ones suffering. Right now the oil industry is clearly winning, not the communities.

“You understand, this is the end of the fishing communities in south Louisiana, for many, many decades to come.”

From the shores of Louisiana: The Louisiana Environmental Action Network

by Jon Bowermaster on

When Marylee Orr started what has become Louisiana’s most effective environmental organization she thought it would be a six-month commitment. “I realized how dirty our air and water were at that time and felt it was my civic duty to try and raise awareness of the problems. But I didn’t realize that it would become my life.” That was twenty-four years ago.

I’ve known Marylee for the past 15 years; we worked together initially on stories about how the big petrochemical plants lining the Mississippi were poisoning local aquifers … and not telling anyone once they learned. Standing in her Baton Rouge driveway two weeks into the spill she rests her arm on a 35-foot-long rowboat that was delivered to her last summer, rowed the length of the Mississippi from its source in Minnesota. Among the many hats she wears as executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, she is also the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper, part of the international Waterkeeper Alliance. The rowboat was gifted to her as a way for her local team to get out onto the river they help protect.

But since the Gulf oil spill, she’s been far too busy to do anything but man the telephones, 12, 13 hours a day. “We are all suffering from disaster fatigue,” she admits, “from sleeping just four and five hours a night for weeks now.

“We are responding just as we did after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Documenting everything that’s going on, trying to keep people informed, especially our fishermen. Being a conduit for information, like about what’s going on with the dispersants that BP is putting in the water and claiming are not harmful. We went to court on a Sunday to force BP to forego the contracts they were trying to get the fishermen who were going to help with the cleanup to sign. They basically said if they got hurt their own insurance would have to cover them, that BP wouldn’t cover their boats if they were damaged and that they wouldn’t be able to speak about what was happening out there, essentially giving away all their rights. We got that stopped in with a lawsuit.

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“But we are also working on getting food to the fishermen because many of them are not going to be making any money for awhile and will have lots of needs.”

“You have to understand that the fishing communities love the sea like they love a child. Part of our duty is to make sure whatever they are doing to try and help save and protect that ‘child’ is safe and fair for them.”

I ask what she considers the worst-case scenario. She doesn’t have to think long: “That this way of life, that these Gulf Coast communities may not exist anymore, that this life as we know it … is finished.

“My own sons, who are now young men, are really concerned about their own future. I mean, Is Baton Rouge going to be lakefront property in their lifetimes? Is the seafood going to be healthy? Are there even going to be any fishermen left in Louisiana? We smile, but it is a little bit like whistling through a graveyard here. If you don’t have a little sense of humor, you’re never going to survive. “

From the shores of Louisiana: Exploring the culture of the oil spill

by Jon Bowermaster on

Breaux Bridge, Louisiana — I’ve been coming to the Gulf coast of Louisiana every few months since July 2008, making a film about the relationship between man and the water in a place where everywhere you look there is glimpse of a river, creek, bayou, basin, swamp, the Gulf or the Mississippi River. Coincidentally, in light of recent events, one of the first things we filmed upon arrival 23 months ago was an oil spill. At the time when an oil tanker t-boned a barge in the middle of the Mississippi River at midnight on July 28 it seemed catastrophic. Now I know that it was in part business as usual.

That 400,000-gallon spill, in the heart of New Orleans’ drinking water source, quickly coated both banks of the river for 80 miles, all the way to the Gulf. We filmed crews in white hazmat suits power-washing oil off the rocks in New Orleans from the tourist promenade lining the river. In an interview with the Department of Environmental Quality official in charge of the state’s waterways he admitted without hesitation that “this kind of thing happens often in Louisiana, given the massive oil and gas industry that controls things here.”

In the months since we have traveled with, interviewed and filmed a half-dozen of Louisiana’s crème-de-la-crème of environmental activists and environmental ills. My original intent was to try and understand and explain the Dead Zone that grows off the mouth of the Mississippi every summer thanks to fertilizers washed down it from 31 northern states. But one interesting character led to another, one mess to another, and we just kept coming back.

My introduction to Louisiana was fifteen years ago when I came down from my home in the Hudson Valley of New York to write for Audubon magazine about a Dow Chemical plant’s pollution of local aquifers in Plaquemine; I visited a different Plaquemine (this is a Parish) last weekend,, which is ground zero for the current spill, its marshes and wetlands in line to be the first to receive oil from the Deepwater spill, most likely this weekend.

In mid-April we were putting the finishing touches on our film – “SoLa, Louisiana Water Stories” – when I heard the first reports of an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next few days I watched in horror, since I was now armed with an insider’s knowledge of just how disastrous the spill could be for the ocean, Louisiana’s coastline and its peoples.

A week ago I returned to southern Louisiana, with video cameras, to re-interview many of the people in our film, to capture their reactions to the still spilling leak. It’s been an emotional past 24 days for each of them; they are truly on the frontlines of trying to assess, clean up and press those accountable. By the time I hooked up with them in the past few days they were already exhausted from a couple weeks of 20 hour days, ranging in efforts to coordinate flyovers for journalists and scientists, finding contributions of protective gear for fishermen enlisted by BP to help clean up, writing press releases, working closely with lawyers suing to make sure fishermen’s lives and rights were being protected and participating in press conferences from the two command centers set up mid-state (in Houma and Roberts).

Ours was never intended to be a film about hurricanes or storms, though their impact will soon be felt in a brand new way as the coming season threatens to carry all that still-floating oil even deeper into Louisiana’s heart. Its intent is not to romanticize fishermen or Cajuns (or their music!). It’s not to turn hard-working environmentalists into heroes and heroines or lying politicians (of which there seem to be an over-abundance in this southland) into even bigger scum than they are.

..the goal all along has simply been to show the complex and connected way of life that links this entire southern coast. Anywhere you turn in Louisiana, there’s water. And everyone in Louisiana has a water story

Rather the goal all along has simply been to show the complex and connected way of life that links this entire southern coast. Anywhere you turn in Louisiana, there’s water. And everyone in Louisiana has a water story … or two, or three. We have filmed in some of the most beautiful corners of the state, from the Atchafalaya swamp — filled with more wildlife than any place in the U.S. to the Gulf off Grand Isle. We’ve also documented some of the region’s most horrific environmental problems including but not limited to oil spills, the Dead Zone, petrochemical plant pollution of air and sky, the cutting down of its natural barrier (the cypress forests), the incredible detritus left behind by the oil and gas companies when they move on and the corruption in government that has for decades led to Louisiana far too often being compared to “America’s toilet bowl.”

In the past dozen years I’ve made as many documentaries; this is the first in the U.S. since 1999. Now that I know Louisiana better, I understand why I was so attracted to the place. Every time I get off the plane in Lafayette I feel like I’ve arrived in some exotic international port. The language is different here; so are the food, the music, and the dance. (I love that everyone here calls me ‘baby,’ from waitresses to grocery store checkout girls, which I initially thought was a true endearment but now realize it’s a comfortable colloquialism.) I’d never been to a Zydeco breakfast before, for example, nor had a lesson in crawfish eating (“pinch their tails, suck their heads”). Now I’m hooked; I can understand why the great documentarian Les Blank made a half-dozen films here forty years ago. It is a rich place for life, for stories, for nature. It’s tragic that it has also become synonymous with disasters, primarily man-made.

Over the next couple weeks I hope my Dispatches from Southern Louisiana will introduce you to some of the powerful conservationist’s voices in the country, all of whom proudly call Cajun country home.

Meanwhile, check out my documentary on SoLA over at jonbowermaster.com