The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (18 page)

2006

OIL AND WATER

The BP Spill in the Gulf

New Orleans’s Saint Charles Avenue is lined with oak trees whose broad branches drip Spanish moss and Mardi Gras beads from the pre-Lenten parades, and behind the oaks are beautiful old houses with turrets, porches, balconies, bay windows, gables, dormers, and lush gardens. There are no refineries for miles, hardly even gas stations on the stretch I was on in mid-June, and the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded on April 20, 2010, and the oil welling up a mile below it were dozens of miles away as the bird flies. So there was no explanation for the sudden powerful smell of gasoline that filled my car for several blocks or for the strange metallic taste in my mouth when I parked at the Sierra Club offices uptown, except that since the BP spill, such incidents have been common. By mid-July, the spill was supposed to be plugged at last, except that the plug is temporary at best, and the millions of gallons of oil are out there in the ocean, on the coast—and in the air.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency have an unhelpful handout for the BP era that says that the effects of such toxic taste

should go away when levels go down or when a person leaves the area. The low levels that have been found are not expected to cause long-term harm. . . . If you smell a “gas station” like odor . . . it may be volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. The key toxic VOCs in most oils are benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.

When I went out on the sea from Grand Isle, which is hardly more than a great sandbar at the end of the watery land south of the city, 109 miles from it by car, the taste was much stronger, and one of my companions on
the boat had run into far worse. Drew Wheelan, a birdwatcher from the American Birding Association, told us that he had walked into a patch of fumes so intense his body seemed to react automatically and fling him away. “I hit a cloud so concentrated,” he wrote on his blog, “that 20 hours later my mouth and tongue still feel as though they’ve been burned by a hot liquid.”

A pregnant friend wondered if she should have left New Orleans altogether, and another friend warned his pregnant girlfriend to stay indoors on the more pungent days. The smells were just part of the ominous, uncertain atmosphere of the Gulf in the wake of the BP spill. The whole region had become something like the Western Front, a place where you might run into pockets of poison gas, except that this wasn’t a battlefront: it’s home, for pregnant women, for children, for old people who’ve spent their entire lives here, for people who love the place passionately, for people who don’t know anyplace else on earth and don’t want to go anywhere, and for people who can’t, at least economically. And for countless birds, fish, crustaceans, cetaceans, and other ocean life. The spill has hit them all hard.

If
spill
is the right word for this oil that didn’t pour down but welled up like magma from the bowels of the earth. It’s also called the Macondo blowout, and maybe
blowout
is a better word. The blowout is about global capital, and about policy, and about the Bush-era corruption that turned the Minerals Management Service into a crony-ridden camp that didn’t do its job, and about Big Oil, and about a host of other things. But it is also about the destruction we’ve all seen in the images, which are horrible in a deep and primordial way. I went out on boats twice and saw an oiled pelican through binoculars and some faint oily traces on wetlands grass and couldn’t quite make out the oiled terns in the distance. And I saw what everyone else could see too, the photographs and footage from those who went to ground zero of this catastrophe.

Mary Douglas said that dirt is matter out of place, and petroleum is out of place everywhere above ground. We design our lives around not seeing it even when we pump it into our cars and burn it; and when we do encounter it, it’s repulsive stuff with a noxious smell, a capacity to cause conflagrations, and a deadly impact. Nature kindly put a huge amount of the earth’s carbon underground, and we have for the past two hundred years been
putting it back into the atmosphere faster and faster, even though we now know that this is a project for which words like “destructive” are utterly inadequate.

There’s a YouTube video shot by an oil-rig diver in which huge brown globs of oil float underwater like colossal clots of phlegm. From the surface, the chunky brown stuff looks like vomit. “Just globs of death out there,” one diver, Al Walker, says in a southern accent. “Oil so thick it blocks out almost all the light below,” says another diver. An AP photograph by Dave Martin shows one of the gentle little waves of the Gulf Coast in close-up, a wave on Orange Beach that’s brownish gold with spots of orange and black oil on it, water acting just like water and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.

And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the Internet, and the media, including CNN. It shows great plumes of smoke rising from the sea, as the oil is burned off the surface. The flames are invisible, but the columns of smoke rise up and float away: burning water, like the famous incident in 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire from having so much industrial contaminant. That was one river in an industrial region; the flat calm blue ocean burning is apocalyptic, a world turned upside-down, rules broken, taboos violated, something as unnatural as nuclear fission and fallout, something nightmarishly wrong, and it extends for hundreds of miles, on water and under it, on shore and in the air.

In the Sierra Club offices, Darryl Malek-Wiley, the club’s local environmental justice organizer, showed us a map of the Gulf, checkerboarded with gas leases, and peppered, as though the map had been hit with buckshot, with oil platforms, 4,000 of them. A news story a week later mentioned the 27,000 old oil wells also out there in the territory the maps show, some probably leaking, but no one is monitoring them. Darryl, a big white-haired guy with a southern accent and a slight Santa affect, showed me another map—an aerial photograph of a portion of the Louisiana coast—
on which you could see all the channels the oil and gas industry has cut through the wetlands, creating straight routes through which water can move fast and hard, cutting the channels wider and eroding this coast still further. “Nature meanders but time is money,” a bayou-dweller told me. About a football field of coastline erodes away every forty-five minutes, and a third map of Darryl’s showed how much land has been lost in the past several decades, since the petroleum industry came to the Gulf, an area about the size of Delaware, or 2,500 square miles.

Oil and gas channels are responsible for nearly half of this erosion of land that is for the most part sediment laid down by the Mississippi over the eons before it was tamed. When you look at the remnant land on a map, it looks like tattered lace, a frail smear of soil pitted and pocketed and veined by fresh and salt water, if the map is up to date. (Mostly we see out-of-date maps that make the coast look more solid and extensive than it is.) From the flat ground you can’t see much of this texture, but water is everywhere, and anything can flood. Most structures rebuilt since 2005 are on stilts a dozen feet or more high, ready for the next surge, flood, or sea-level rise, if not for the continuing erosion that will leave a lot of these structures literally out at sea. Sometimes traveling through this country you see drowned old structures whose underpinnings the sea has already reclaimed.

Another source of coastal erosion is the channelization of the Mississippi, which no longer delivers sediment in the quantities it did when it was building up the delta. The place had a lot of problems before BP, really. Shrimping was being undermined by cheap, ecologically horrendous shrimp farms in Asia and Central America, and the Mississippi was delivering its own form of death to the ocean: nitrogen from synthetic fertilizers in the corn belt of the Midwest washes into the river and out to the delta, where it feeds algae blooms that die, decay, and take much of the oxygen out of the seawater. The dead zone is about 8,500 square miles. About a third of the corn is supposed to be for ethanol, the not-very-green alternative to petroleum, so you can see the Gulf being throttled by a pair of energy-economy hands. Inland are the refineries and chemical plants that have given a swathe of the region the nickname Cancer Alley.

Louisiana is in many ways a semi-tropical Third World country with a resource-extraction economy that subsidized splendid social programs in the era of Huey Long, a lot of subsistence lifestyles in remote and roadless places, and corruption and incompetence galore. The current conservative senator, David Vitter, has been mixed up with prostitutes while preaching family values; the Democratic congressman from New Orleans had to resign after he was found to have an unexplained $90,000 in his freezer (in an interesting twist, the disarray he created in the large African-American population allowed the much smaller Vietnamese-American population to send its first representative to the House, Anh “Joseph” Cao, the congressman who in June suggested that BP’s president should be given a knife to commit hara-kiri).

People like to say that New Orleans is not a particularly poor, corrupt American city, but rather the rich northern capital of the Caribbean, with its vibrant African-descended cultures, Carnival, sweet gregariousness, and warm weather conducive to living in public. It is rich in cultural creation and continuity in a way no other place in the United States is. Before Katrina, it had the most stable population of any American city: people stayed in one neighborhood, sometimes one house, for generations; they knew their music, their food, their history, and their neighbors, and they celebrated their rituals, which are complex and frequent in this Catholic bacchanal of a port town that has a second-line jazz parade with dancing in the streets forty Sundays a year and a plethora of social organizations, mostly segregated.

It also suffers from racism and hurricanes. Hurricanes make and unmake the landscape. In Hurricane Rita, Chevron’s deepwater platform, cleverly named Typhoon, drifted dozens of miles from its position. Another platform was carried sixty-six miles by Katrina and washed up on Dauphin Island. A rig owned by Shell broke free from the Mars platform and dragged a twelve-ton anchor that crushed oil pipelines. The hurricane destroyed seven platforms, damaged twenty-four, and created underwater mudslides that dislodged more than a hundred pipelines. When you travel around the coast, signs everywhere warn you not to dredge or even cast anchor because of the underwater pipelines.
This place was already a toxic mess before the Macondo blowout, thanks to oil.

Eight million gallons of petroleum were spilled in Hurricane Katrina alone, and other spills in the Gulf include the colossal Mexican oil-well blowout of 1979 that sent oil all the way up the Texas coast. That one is over, and maybe it’s evidence that a region can recover, if the most directly affected town, Ciudad del Carmen, did recover—what was once a shrimping economy there is now based on petrojobs.

Before the blowout, Katrina seemed like the worst thing that could have happened. Now people mention the hurricane to explain how much worse the blowout is. Not in terms of immediate loss of human life or social conflict, but in terms of clarity and solutions. Hurricanes come in; they wreck and flood; they’re over; you clean up. This thing—when will it be over and how can you clean up? Technological disasters—meltdowns, contaminations, toxic spills—tend to be more traumatic than natural disasters, because their consequences are hard to measure and hard to recover from. If you’ve just been irradiated or poisoned, you don’t know if you’re going to die of it in twenty years’ time or have kids with birth defects; you don’t know if it can be cleaned up or how or what clean or safe means; your home might be permanently contaminated and you don’t know. You’re also likely to have the liable corporation lying to you, whether the incident is Three Mile Island or Bhopal or the
Exxon Valdez
.

Uncertainty has been central to the horror of the spill: unlike a hurricane or an earthquake, the spill has no clear termination, no precedent. There’s little that ordinary people can do to respond and no imaginable end to its consequences. “People have a feeling their way of life is disappearing,” Darryl at the Sierra Club told me. “What if a really big storm comes right at the rig? Is BP gonna give me one check? Two checks? The next twenty years while we can’t fish? Sometimes I don’t wanna think about it. I drink a beer, maybe more than one.”

“It was already poor and now it’s gonna be fuckin’ destitute,” Henry Rhodes, the tattoo artist who called the first big demonstration against BP in New Orleans and then cofounded the organization Murdered Gulf, told me. “I don’t even eat seafood anymore, because that shit’s fucked up.”
A native New Orleanian, the blond, goateed, and heavily inked man spoke passionately, mournfully, about what he saw as the destruction of his homeland. And he said the moratorium on deepwater rigs on top of the destruction of the seafood industry means “100 billion annually that’s just gone.”