Oil Spill in the Gulf

Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
Gulf Oil Spill
Or
And Not A Drop To Drink
Okay, here we are on day fifty four, day fifty four and the earth is still hemorrhaging vital fluid of a poisonous nature into waters that supported life… once. I find myself in a Costnerish moment, but I believe not even Kevin in all his psycho-environmental weirdness could have imagined this ass kicking. An epic adventure of a monumental catastrophe without a hero, plot or frontal nudity scene. This one is rated WFN (We’re Fucked Now) and is not suitable for impressionable minds. Watch nonstop, via video-cam, the world turning to pitch and washing up on a shore near you.
Fifty-four days in and it’s like a Grateful Dead set, we’re caught in a ‘no way forward and no way back’ conundrum. Fifty-four days in and there is no relief in sight; the oil is spewing, gushing and vomiting from a depth of over four miles below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and not all the kings horses nor all the kings men can slow or stop the calamity.
Does it seem like I am using many words of the doom and gloom nature? You bet your sweet ass I am. In a few short days our oysters will be a thing of the past; the great Louisiana oyster, a hybrid of indigenous stock and Croatian implants cross-cultured and bred over a century to produce the gustatory sweet soul sensation that we here were so proud of. The banning of our bivalves across the country met with sneers here, whoever these people were that shunned our supplies just because of potential health hazards could just go without, period. The call to process the oyster by some kind of sterilization almost caused riots; how dare someone tamper with perfection. We do not eat our oysters for any other reason than they taste wonderful and they are ours. If you have health issues, we say, don’t eat ‘em. Simple.
But, there goes the oysters, there go local shrimp, there go any wild caught seafood; the abomination that pollutes the Gulf, insidiously is creeping up the coast, into Mobile Bay, up onto Florida’s beaches and rounding the bend and heading into the Atlantic coast, how’s that for tragedy? This one is not getting swept under the rug, my friend, and we’ve got the seabird, turtle and dolphin carcasses to prove it.
What is being done? Not much; we’re promised, for sure, that the completion of the drilling of the relief well will solve everything IN AUGUST!!!!
Word around here is that if they pour enough concrete into the sucker it will stop, but then the valve that has become a piece of evidence will be sealed and no-one will ever know what happened. Another thought around here is that if they did stop the flow it would cut off the access to a lot of income; most of us don’t give a shit, we want the disastrous leak sealed. And the prevailing opinion is that it has taken too long and gone on too far and we are really screwed this time.
“Well, what about hurricane season?” you may ask. And well you may ask; this season is supposed to be a rip-roarer and there is no way to prepare for that except to keep your perishables at low inventory and your vehicle tuned and gassed. “What if a storm picks up the oil slick and dumps it on you, is that a possibility?” Who knows, the gulf waters are now in the eighties, El Nino is coming in and it’s hot as hell here; the levees are not up to the pre-Katrina levels and WFN!
Now it’s day fifty-five and headlines of local newspaper articles include “Thousands of people, vessels already in Gulf to combat oil”
“Dredging to create sand berms in Gulf may start this weekend.”
“Rig owners waiting for next step.”
“6- month moratorium called too short.”
“Vessel carrying oil from the leak arrives in Mobile today.”
“Grand Isle mayor plans to deploy barges in two passes.”
“Petition seeking shorter drilling moratorium gathers steam in Louisiana.”
“Some say hurricane would flatten berms.”
“Animals go into labeled containers, frozen.”
Yeah, about those animals. We now have an ‘Animal Collection Report’ in the paper.
Birds: collected 1,183 alive 504---dead 679
Sea Turtles: collected 351 alive 55---dead 296
Mammals includes dolphins: collected 39 alive 2
Other quotes in today’s paper are:
“IT’S LIKE A CLOUD OF WORRY” which means that we’re in a world of hurt down here. “Seafood supplies are dwindling”, “The Coast Guard tells BP: too little, too slow” and “Cleanup crews appear to be one step behind the spill.”
Meanwhile our President is making up to the Prime Minister of England while our mayor is spatting with his counterpart in London. Oh boy, I know you’re saying, why is God so mad at them poor crackers and coloreds in Louisiana? Well, to tell you the truth we really don’t know; it’s as if we are under siege by the sirens leading us to our demise. We are flummoxed by our fates as the cosmic whipping boys and who, just who do you complain to? It’s another case of the Department of Happy Endings being closed to those that are the most in need.
Oh, and by the way, we can smell oil in the air here when a good breeze blows in. There are people down here that are getting chest pains, shortness of breath and headaches. Oil? Airborne ‘dispersants’? Our imagination? For the record, I don’t feel so good myself. More later.
I’m posting this, unfinished, to get your reactions, I’ll be adding to it later today, tomorrow and on and frigging on……..stay tuned