The Shadows Gather
Two weeks ago this is how the beach at Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge looked…COVERED with a thick shelf of oil. Yesterday the NY Times ran an article with this headline: REPORT FORESEES QUICK GULF OF MEXICO RECOVERY. Does anyone notice a discrepancy in the photograph I took a couple weeks ago and the image Mr. Feinburg is painting of the Gulf Coast?
As I sat finishing my breakfast, I read the article posted on Facebook and about jumped off my chair with anger. The report says the Gulf should recover by the end of 2012. Perhaps they are counting on the Mayan calendar’s expiration and the potential end of the world as we know it to make this prediction. Seriously! I spoke with a wildlife biologist last Saturday and she said it takes a minimum of 3 to 5 years for wildlife populations to show the true picture after an event such as this. Maybe Mr. Feinburg–I mean BP–has resorted to wishful thinking as their modus operandi.
Wes Tunnell, a marine biologist at Texas A & M, wrote the report that said some areas will have fewer fish, shrimp and crab but overall regional 2011 catches for blue crabs, shrimp, oysters and fin fishes should be in line with catches before the spill. By the way, he was paid by BP to write the document. And…he doesn’t offer any estimates on how much hydrocarbon residue is expected to be found in said seafood species. Whatever happened to non-biased scientific data collection? Oh, the oil companies run the country…how silly of me to forget.
From the beginning of the spill I have thought the Coast Guard to be a puppet of BP…of oil corporations. From watching Rear Admiral Mary Landree mindlessly nod her head in press briefings by Doug Suttles, the BP spokesperson during the spill, to this latest bogus report by scientists funded by BP (isn’t that in itself a conflict of interest?)…the Coast Guard agrees with anything BP says. Again…I cry FOUL! and….WAKE UP AMERICA!
A voice of sanity is included in the Times article. Dr. James Cowan, a biological oceanographer at LSU said his group has found “troubling signs of apparent oil damage” to shrimp and fish. “In my mind, the long-term, indirect effects are going to be the most insidious and also the most difficult to ascertain,” he said.
This past summer I witnessed local government officials laughing at ‘dumb tourists’ swimming (yes….I have video footage) in crude oil. I heard one mayor say ‘we have to get the clean-up workers off the beach during the day…it is scaring the tourists’ (yep…got THAT on video as well). So should we be surprised at the continued denial of the damage that was done and how it continues to affect the Gulf Coast? Absolultely NOT! No surprise here. So how can an article like this help us? It can give us a renewed sense of purpose to ensure the light of truth be presented through reporting true stories, showing images and video, and through voices that are LIVING IT. Let the TRUTH dispel the shadows before they completely cover-up the real story of what is happening along the Gulf Coast.
This shows a block of hardened crude oil washed ashore mid-January 2011. Who said the oil is gone? It’s over? Hardly any workers were to be seen with hundreds of tons of crude oil imbedded in the beach in the wildlife refuge. BP has not even cleaned up the mess yet they are claiming within two years everything will be great, back to normal? This is the height of insanity.