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.”
Margaret Dubuisson, the communications director for the local branch of Catholic Charities, spoke with me at the crisis center in the Vietnamese community in New Orleans East. A huge portion of the immigrant Vietnamese population either fish or process seafood for a living, she said. They are not well educated, and often their English is negligible: “They have Ph.D.s in fishing, but some of them did not go to high school—did not go to grade school. The skills don’t transfer. Oyster fishermen especially. If that closes, you can’t go a hundred miles up the bayou. It’s not transferable.” Oystermen here work like farmers, with designated beds they tend and harvest; if your bed is contaminated, you’re out of luck. Fresh Mississippi river water redirected to keep oil away from the oyster seedbeds has devastated the saltwater organisms, and the $330 million industry is in big trouble.
It’s said that Corexit, the dispersant now being used on the oil, causes birth defects and testicular and reproductive damage, particularly the old batch of more toxic Corexit 9527 that’s been used along with the new formula, Corexit 9500. The 407 dead sea turtles may have drowned because of neurological damage from the oil or the dispersant—or in shrimp nets operated by fishermen desperate to get their last catches. About 2 million gallons of dispersant are said to have been poured into the sea.
Why BP has been using dispersant at all is a question whose answer seems to be about a policy of disguising, repressing, and hiding the damage. One cleanup worker quit because she said they were told to remove only the surface sand: the BP supervisors just wanted the beach to look clean. One BP contractor, ex-soldier Adam Dillon, was fired for questioning the cleanup after working for months to keep the media at bay. He describes thick oil and disgruntled workers from whom he kept journalists away. BP has created a no-fly zone; the cooperative Coast Guard keeps boats at a distance, their captains afraid of huge penalties if they cross into restricted waters. Workers were obliged to sign non-disclosure contracts; others had all recording technologies confiscated, and data on worker exposure were suppressed. Scientists were not allowed data. Birders were allowed to band but not put transmitters on rescued birds, according to Drew Wheelan. And data on the spill were constantly spun so the volume of gas upwelling was smaller, the impact was less, the facts were unavailable. A vast area of the ocean is now the scene of a cover-up. Even Anderson Cooper, the star anchor on CNN, has spoken out vehemently against this oceanic lockdown that treats scientists and journalists as the enemy.
BP rules the waves and a lot of Louisiana. I met one boat’s captain who’d been trying to get information fr
om the Coast Guard but was repeatedly passed on to BP, which also seemed to be calling the shots on land about who could go where, controlling media access and even air traffic to the area of the spill. Police, sheriffs, National Guardsmen, and politicians seemed to be taking their orders from the corporation whose power, rather than shrinking, has in a strange way grown from its folly and destruction. BP has also taken over virtual space, buying up ads on the Internet and spending a great deal of money to ensure that its own propaganda sites come up first in searches for topics related to the spill. BP’s hegemony is part of the helplessness people here feel. BP negligently created a blowout but has intentionally staged a coup. Of course Big Oil has been running American politics for more than a century, an achievement that peaked with the Bush administration. Much of the criticism of Obama is for not sufficiently reining in what his predecessor wrought.
The blowout was not only the biggest oil spill in American history by far: it’s a story that touches on everything else—taints everything, like the black glop on sandy beaches, on pelicans, terns, boats, sea turtles, marshlands, and dolphins. It’s about climate change, peak oil, the energy future, the American presidency; about corporate power and the corrosive effect of Big Oil on global politics. It’s also about technology, geology, biology, oceanography, ornithology, the rich, and deeply entrenched cultures of the Gulf; about human health and risk management; about domestic violence, despair, drinking, unemployment, and bankruptcy; about British pension funds, the wake-up call to shareholders, and the class action suit brought by the New Orleans chef Susan Spicer of the restaurant Bayona because contamination, scarcity, or outright loss of the primary ingredients in the region’s cuisine—shrimp, crab, fish, and crayfish—is one current and probably continuing outcome of the blowout.
Drill, baby, drill, Sarah Palin’s petro chant, is not going to be heard again soon. If the BP blowout had to happen, it happened at an opportune time. Weeks earlier, Obama had said that offshore oil wells were safe and that he was going to open up for exploration and drilling portions of the Atlantic and northern coast of Alaska, much of it for the first time. Shell was preparing to drill in the fragile Beaufort and Chukchi sea regions of the Alaskan Arctic. All of that got put on hold. Timing is everything. If the global economy had waited a month longer to collapse in 2008, there’s a good chance John McCain would have become president and Sarah Palin would have been even harder to get rid of.
The blowout also happened at an interesting moment in global history. On the one hand, the conversations about climate change, after the post-Copenhagen hangover, got a little jolt of urgency from this reminder of how brutal, humanly and ecologically, petroleum extraction is. In an essay for TomDispatch.com posted in May, Michael Klare reminded us that the Deepwater Horizon blowout is an augury of the age of extreme extraction to come: “While poor oversight and faulty equipment may have played a critical role in BP’s catastrophe in the Gulf, the ultimate source of the disaster is Big Oil’s compulsive drive to compensate for the decline in its conventional oil reserves by seeking supplies in inherently hazardous areas—risks be damned.” The disaster furthers the arguments for moving away from a carbon economy sooner by putting on display how grotesque these systems—gigantic offshore rigs and drills that go miles below the deep ocean floor—are even when they work.
Horrendous as the spreading oil is, the overall effect on the environment—more climate change—would have been even more irreversibly destructive had the stuff been collected and burned as planned: the biggest disaster, a number of scientists say, is the invisible one we all add to every day with our airplanes and cars, steaks and air conditioners, overseas goods and coal-fired power plants. When everything goes exactly as planned, a deepwater drilling platform is profoundly destructive, polluting, toxic, and dirty: waste goes directly into the surrounding water, drilling releases heavy metals from the sea floor into the sea, and other toxins enter the water. Deepwater drilling releases colossal quantities of methane hydrates, thus releasing methane, a greenhouse gas at least twenty times as potent a climate changer as carbon dioxide. I don’t know if this has been a wake-up call to the horrors of the carbon economy, but I haven’t heard much from the climate-change deniers lately.
In the wake of the economic collapse of 2008, a new anti-corporate rage has seized the United States, and the BP disaster has focused hatred on the oil companies. If there was a left with the capacity to focus this rage into reform, we might be arguing about the abolition of their huge tax dodges or even the end of corporate personhood—the granting of human and even constitutional individual rights to these behemoths—or the nationalization à la Venezuela of the oil industry. But we’re not. Things are dying from BP, but not much is being born that I can see.
Still, the $20 billion claims fund and the $100 million for worker compensation constitute a fairly unprecedented assault on the citadel of corporate profit, a pre-emptive payment. Exxon was able to fight out compensation for the 1989 Exxon Valdez’s Prince William Sound spill in court, dragging the process out for decades, outlasting its opponents, and finally settling in 2008 for a pittance compared to the destruction and suffering the corporation’s spill had created. As Antonia Juhasz wrote in 2009, in The Tyranny of Oil,
Big Oil gets sued a lot, and its greatest defense is its financial might—its ability to outspend any and all challengers (whether it’s a single gasoline consumer in Illinois or the federal government) and ride cases out for five, ten or even 20 years. . . . Chevron alone has 300 in-house lawyers and an annual budget of $100 million for farming out litigation to private firms. It employs some 450 law firms globally.
“This is the biggest thing to happen to Big Oil in a hundred years,” Juhasz told me on June 26, just after the local iteration of the national Hands Across the Sand solidarity demonstrations at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. “That is, since the Standard Oil monopoly was broken up. And maybe bigger,” she added. The damage of the spill remains to be seen in the Gulf and in the way it may reshape or dismantle Britain’s single largest corporation, encourage the regulation of the oil industry and perhaps corporate accountability, and affect the significant but subtler business of public opinion. The recently radicalized Sierra Club used the blowout as an occasion to call for an end to U.S. dependency on oil within twenty years.
Obama compared the blowout to 9/11, which brings up all kinds of possibilities, notably the one that BP is the new al-Qaida, and once you speculate about that, all sorts of interesting ways of mapping the situation arise. Osama bin Laden’s inherited wealth was also oil money, or rather construction money from building the infrastructure for the Saudi oil empire, and fifteen of his nineteen hijackers on September 11 were Saudis too. The blowout is really just part of what you could call the contemporary oilscape, which includes the war in Iraq, the presence of the United States in Kuwait and formerly in Saudi Arabia (this was one of bin Laden’s grievances), and the role of Big Oil in American politics—which was not long ago dominated by a president, vice president, secretary of state, and others direct from the industry.
The cleanup’s lack of safety measures also recalls 9/11. After that disaster, Rudy Giuliani and the Bush administration, anxious to get business back in business and to assert their capacity to handle the situation, suppressed information about the toxicity of the burning heap of rubble that had been the World Trade Center. Asbestos, plastics, heavy metals, PCBs, and other toxins were all going up in smoke and into the lungs of anyone nearby, but the Environmental Protection Agency was pressured into turning scary scientific analysis into reassuring press releases, and thousands of workers worked for months without respirators. “World Trade Center cough” is a widespread disorder among New York City firemen today, and more than 10,000 people have sought treatment after inhaling the fumes.
Similarly, in the Gulf many of the cleanup workers have been sent into toxic situations without protective clothing or respirators. “When I visited a Louisiana Parish Work Release jail this pa
st Friday, it was early evening, and the inmates were returning from their twelve-hour workday shoveling oil-soaked sand into trash bags,” my friend Abe Louise Young, whom I met through her Katrina oral history project nearly five years earlier, wrote to me.
Wearing BP uniforms and rubber boots (nothing identifying them as inmates), they were driven in an unmarked white van, and looked dog-tired. The majority of beach workers are African American. It’s a striking sight in the Louisiana coastal towns where eight out of ten people are white—and the only telltale sign of their incarceration. In the first few days after the blowout, cleanup workers could be seen wearing scarlet pants and white T-shirts with “Inmate Labor” printed in large red block letters. Outrage flared among local officials and newly unemployed residents desperate for work. Those explicit outfits disappeared in a matter of days. The clothing change is no accident—it’s an effort at concealing the nature of BP’s labor force. Work-release prisoners have no choice in their job assignments. After arriving in BP uniforms, the inmates suit up in Tyvek head-to-toe coveralls.
Forced labor in toxic conditions. Cheap prison labor undercutting cleanup income for unincarcerated, unemployed Gulf residents. Dead sea turtles by the hundred. Turtles being burned. Plumes of smoke rising up from the burning ocean. Dead whales. Pelicans soaked in oil. Fourteen thousand Vietnamese fishermen out of work in New Orleans Parish alone after having survived Katrina, Rita, and Gustav, after surviving the Vietnam War and exile. A way of life dead, at least temporarily, for the Vietnamese, Cajun, white, black, and indigenous communities of the waterlands. Rebuilt homes in a landscape suddenly without jobs. Derrick Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives told me, as we traveled through the oil-smeared islands of marsh grass in Grand Bayou, that a bayou dweller named Mike had told him: “Osama fuckin’ bin Laden could not have imagined, planned or executed more devastation than BP has.”
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Page 14