Oil spill update from the field: A way of life is scorched, for both fishermen and their dogs
05/28/2010
The oil slick seeps and swirls. For a photo, and to satisfy curiosity, this blogger sticks his finger in. (Photo by Kim Hubbard/Audubon magazine)
Pass a loutre, Lousiana, May 28
Cauliflower, caterpillars, liver spots, Italy. Twister, typhoon, egg yolk, placenta. A genie in a bottle, a scorpion’s tail, the woman in the moon. A face howling like Munch’s Scream. Like cream in your coffee, like suds in the tub, I see shapes in the swirling slick, as it laps against stalks of cane grass, leaving the bases black, crude somehow seeping up the stalks, so that even the spindly green leaves well above the waterline are etched in oil. The entire marsh has been dipped in it, a gunky seam between high tide and low that from afar resembles a thick black bathtub ring.
I am with a camera-laden Kim Hubbard, Audubon magazine’s photo editor, an unshaven fisherman with a gold marlin necklace named Carey O’Neil and his yellow lab Bullet, in a small fiberglass boat. Carey has steered us into a pear-shaped cut in the cane where a vast slick has accumulated so that Kim and I can document the effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill. We are in Blind Bay, near one of the Mississippi’s final four fingers to the sea. “We can ride this coastline for miles,” says Carey, “all you see is spots like this.”
According to new government estimates, 30 million gallons of crude oil may have gushed from the Deepwater wellhead. Nearly 900,000 gallons of chemicals so toxic that the EPA ordered BP to stop using them have been pumped into the Gulf to disperse the oil. Sea turtles are stranding in numbers three times the norm, a series of islands with brown pelican colonies were at one time entirely surrounded by the slick and thousands of people like Carey have lost their livelihood.
Carey O'Neil, a fishermen out of work because of the spill, checks to make sure oil isn't sticking to his boat. Growing up in the marshes outside Venice, Carey took a school boat to school. (Photo by Kim Hubbard/Audubon magazine).
“I’m gonna show you where I grew up,” he says, navigating through marsh alleyways. Along a wide channel lined by Katrina collapsed homes and derelict pilings, he points out where his best friend used to live, where his ex-wife used to live, where his grandpa used to live. As a child Carey took a school boat to school. There were no roads and no electricity. Venice, a town that once held about 1,500 people, was the big city. “As kids we used to get in a pirogue and just paddle all day and all night and go back the next day,” says Carey.
He kills the engine and we drift. Plants called elephant ears thicket the waterline and above them towers a reedy forest of what locals call roseau cane. Willows blow in the breeze, bearing the cottony remains of blossoms. A gator surfaces, only its eyes and snout visible, then another. Blackbird babble drifts from the marsh and a pair of great egrets sail overhead, white as snow. “That bird is our magazine’s symbol,” says Kim, as she snaps them. “You know what the local Cajun people call those white birds,” says Carey. “White birds.” A carp jumps into the boat and lands with a thud beside Bullet.
Venice is a mecca for shrimpers and fishermen but much of the land, including the marshes where Carey grew up, is owned by energy companies; in town there is a Halliburton Road. Each September, Morgan City, a few parishes to the west, hosts the Louisiana State Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, the symbol is a giant shrimp with a hardhat clasped around an oil rig. After high school many kids here face a tough career choice, shrimp or oil; hard-workers can make $60,000 a year right off the bat in either. One year Carey made $180,000. He stays out for days, sleeping in his boat, listening to cane grass rustle in the wind at night. I ask why he chose shrimp over oil. “Some guys just can’t get it, some guys do,” says Carey. “I’m no lawyer, I’m no plumber. I’m a shrimper.”
We enter the Mississippi and a breeze kicks up. There is a refuge tower with zigzag stairs and an island with oil tanks. Pilottown, where the bar pilots, who steer freighters from the river’s mouth get off and the river pilots, who pilot them to New Orleans take over. Raphael Pass leads us to Blind Bay. There we find pontoon boats, white tubing is coiled across their decks like an immaculate beast’s disemboweled intestines. This is absorbent boom and each day Carey’s childhood friends are paid by BP to lay it out. They wear orange life jackets and hardhats, many complain the company is paying them to do its dirty work and worry the job is hazardous to their health. Just yesterday, their worst fears were confirmed; several fishermen skimming oil in Breton Sound were rushed to the hospital, having experienced nausea, dizziness, headaches and chest pains. But Carey's friends don’t have much choice. “They got a wife and kids at home and the light bill’s due,” he says.
It's all Greek for Carey's dog Bullet, who pants happily as we pass both pristine habitat and oiled marsh. (Photo by Kim Hubbard/Audubon magazine)
With Bullet’s pink tongue lagging low and saliva dripping from his gums we enter the pear-shaped cut in the cane. Here is the oil, accumulated in giant orange lily pads, thick brown seams and thin black ribbons. Our boat drives in a wave and the slick reacts like mercury, regrouping and splitting back apart in ways unknown. The surface of the water is smothered, the marsh is black.
For the sake of a photo and to quell my own curiosity I sacrifice the middle finger on my left hand and dip slowly into a seam. Drops scatter and my fingertip is gone. The feeling is unlike what I expected. The oil is actually soft, warm on the outside where it has soaked the sun, cooler on the inside, where it is in contact with the water. It clings to my skin, but isn’t sticky, until I pull my finger out. Attached is an orange glob, no longer pretty and shifting shapes; now it feels like poison. Kim photographs it and I quickly wipe away the oil with a wet nap and paper towels. Bullet is still panting happily. Carey looks crestfallen.
“Right where we’re floating at,” he says. “I shrimp right here, I fish crabs right here.”
Justin Nobel/Audubon Magazine
The slick shifts shapes constantly, resembling cauliflower, Italy or Jupiter's Great Red Spot. (Photo by Kim Hubbard/Audubon magazine)
This is the goo we developed machines to clean!
Oil Slicks to oily animals we have perfected the technology and constantly improved it for years. These clean anything from Boats and rocks to 20 tools spraying warn soapy cleaner to decontaminate Birds and other animals as well as suck up the oily water for proper disposal.
We built the machines for the Exxon Valdez cleanup and have been producing specialty disaster cleanup machines for 22 years.
Please watch the video of this machines sister one called the Prodigy Hsr. at www.powerplusonline.com we build portable skimmers that remove the oil that already has gotten into the tributaries and delicate marshes.
Forward this to who ever might be responsible for cleanup of the shores/boats act. From this spill. We have a trained chemist as well as Engineer who has consulted on every major US. Disaster in the last 22 years.
We can help but you need to route this properly by forwarding it to the correct persons.
Thanks for Caring!
venice oil
Great blog Justin,
I'll be reading with enthusiasm. It seems like the media machine is starting to get the story right, but I think that it's people like us in the trenches that help steer it in the right direction. Thanks for your hard work, and obvious dedication. Please be in touch, would love to chat,
Drew
http://www.birding.typepad.com/gulf
A solution to recover the oily sea water with high performance!
Hi,
Please look at: http://community.livejournal.com/savegulftech/
We would like to implement a technology and evaluate the hardware (to be implemented as necessary), to focus on reduction of the damage to the lands and sea water by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico due to
DeepWaterHorizon accident in the Gulf. We have an idea, a theory and a technical solution, which could be a key one to scale down the negative impact of the disaster consequences from oily sea water in the Gulf of the Mexico.
Solution is developed by Russian scientific organization and the company, under the management of researchers, who invented the solution. This is not an offer from the government of Russia. Details of funding required, could be arranged and negotiated, as grant-basis, cooperational,
partnership or other activities, with proper assignments.
Successful start and completion of that project TODAY, NOW may create a scaleable tool (vessel-based or boat-based) for real-time fights with events of such nature in the future. For current accident, in 3-4 months, ecology could be damaged much more, we hope you understand this.
ANYONE interested to lock down the disaster in the Gulf and its
consequences - the university, an ecology fund, the oil company, state government or private investors, and who may help us to help you to do it faster and better - please contact me at any time!
Please review our offer!
Brief description:
Our solution is based on 3 types of hardware (A, B and C) and is focused to recover the huge volumes of oily sea water from oil, spilled into the sea,
having relatively low cost, high performance and high efficiency. This is a new combination of proven technologies, we research and delelop. Underwater cloud of oil (if exist any over there), could be removed from the sea water, from the depth of up to 1 km - is TBD!.
We are NOT offering the method or technology on how to STOP the chink leaking.
Tech. details are:
Oily water is being processed by very powerful water recovery station (hardware A), as output - there are clear water, which goes back to the sea or ocean and recovered oil.
Recovered oil burns at the vessel board within special torch (hardware B) without any preparation of recovered oil for burning, as output there are a lot of heat, some soot and some hydrocarbon.
Soot and hydrocarbon are removed out of the torch and this is not a bottleneck for high-throughput neither a problem for removal and
utilisation.
Heat is used to power up the hardware B (new type of external combustion turbine, called RLDVPT). RLDVPT produces local electric power up to 2MW (two megawatts).
Electric power is applied to the hardware C - powerful water recovery station with high volume of sea water processing, electric power driven.
So, we have a set of hardware connected in circilar way and this becomes autonomous water recovery solution, until oily sea water exist in the area of the sea to be recovered.
Diesel fuel and vessel engine work is not required, during the clean-up procedure, electric drive operates the vehicle under water flow and wind, so a vessel could clear the area of the sea or ocean by 24h a day without return to the port for refuel with high maneurability.
Performance criteria
For example: contaminants treated or measured, quantifiable reduction in contaminant concentration, etc.
1) quality / compliance of sea water to initial state, after recovery process is applied
2) cost of 1m3 of sea water recovered from oil waste
3) ability to operate 24h versus scheduled timeline
4) savings in time and economy in cost of diesel fuel to be spend for vessels executing clean-up process
5) depth of successful recovery
6) total cost of the project and it's length / staging
7) speed of recovery per 1 hour / 1 day / 1 month
8) square of affected area being successfully recovered
9) ability to attach the hardware solution on various vessel types and provide unification of solution to future use
10) advance of science
11) advance of technology
12) other advantages and parameters to be measured by 3rd party government or business authorities - method of measurement is TBD!
Cost (include area or volume treated for that amount):
This is staged expense (including preparation phase, production phase, deployment phase and operational phase). Costs would also be fixed and variable.
As, the volume of sea water to be processed (recovered) and the level of water pollution is officially unknown, we can estimate the cost of hardware and the cost of work
to mount the hardware on vessels, plus estimate the cost of rent for all vessels provided to participate, per N days of their work.
Cost of hardware offered is fixed. If you are serious to get it - please do a conference call with us for evaluation.
Throughput
In the process of oily sea water recovery, we plan to process up to 200m3 of it (appx. 50.000 gallons) per 1 hour of water recovery station
operation,
mounted on any suitable vessel to carry the complex of required hardware in 20ft and in 40ft containers. To be correct, many factors influence the throughput
- weather conditions, wind force, level of oil in the water, square of disaster, power of water recovery station, other issues.
We know, that such a disaster had never been before, so our goal is to balance the amount of oily water spilled into the sea daily with the capacity
of few dozens or more vessels, equipped with our hardware and dedicated to the cleaning process.
If we can recover the same amount of water as it is being spilled daily, it is OK to our current understanding of the situation.
We hope to try to increase the volume of processing of oiled water up to 400m3 per 1 hour.
Has this been field-tested? Yes No
If yes, brief description of testing:
Certain elements and separately - YES. Particular combination of elements - NO. There is outstanding science in the background,
proven by years of research and development, so verification is required not for method of operation of the whole system,
but for validness of estimates of power consumption relative to given speed of recovery, depth, best work temperature and actual recovered water output.
Scalability of the solution is another point of discussion, which has extensive way of resolution (by using extra vessels)
or by installing more powerful hardware (with higher volume processing per 1 hour).
1) We are sure in each element of the solution to work.
2) We are sure this solution (as complete solution) will work EXCELLENT. 3) We are sure, this solution will be helpful, highly efficient, with high performance and cost effective.
4) We are also sure, this new technology has not been before attempted in full, as no such a disaster happened before.
Thank you for reviewing our proposal!
Thank you again,
Maxim Bocharov
Russia, Moscow
+7 985 920-01-67