Shaking my tiny fist at epic asshattery since 1979 
This past Thursday, a week after the horrifying explosion on the Deepwater Horizon claimed the lives of eleven men, I awoke to a peculiar smell and a pounding headache. Four Advil later, I realized what I was smelling: crude oil, hanging like an omen over New Orleans.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
40,000 barrels a day are gushing into the Gulf of Mexico—five times the government’s estimate.
Can you even fathom that? I sure as hell can’t. I’m angry, scared and strangely determined to fix my home.
I am a gulf coast gal, raised near Escambia Bay and proud owner of that peculiar southern/gulf twang so endemic of these parts. I grew up digging my toes in the soft, quartz sand of the Florida panhandle. I have gone scalloping in Steinhatchee and oyster harvesting in Apalachicola.
This is my home, goddamnit. And it’s starting to sink in that it may look like Chernobyl in six months.
In ten years, in all likelihood, I will have oil in my lung tissue and be at risk for cancer. My children (as yet unconceived) will be at serious risk for major health issues.
In ten years, my hopefully non-mutated children won’t know about shrimp boils and raw oysters and the other epicurean delights of living along the coast.
In ten years, the once vibrant Gulf of Mexico will probably be a murky dead zone.
That’s why I care – my husband and I planned to settle here in the Crescent City. We had dreams of rehabbing a historic house, baptizing our children at our parish church and enjoying the incredibly awesome quality of life here.
That may not be possible now.
But why should you care?
- Because fragile estuaries and wetlands are about to get bent over further than Lindsay Lohan on a bender. Because of levee changes and river redirection efforts in the twentieth century, Louisiana’s coast loses the equivalent of three football fields worth of wetlands a DAY.
- Because deregulation and corporate lobbying have fucked Mother Earth raw. All those pristine sugar white beaches in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida will soon be covered with tar balls and dead wildlife.
- Because entire economies (fishing/shrimping and tourism/hospitality) are being eradicated.
- Because Rush Limbaugh should shut his goddamned trap. So should the entire group of sheeple at Fox News, actually. Fuck you, Rush Limbaugh, you fucking fuck (if you haven’t watched Treme yet, you’re missing out on an epic characterization of the late, great Ashley Morris). Listen, whackjobs – this wasn’t ecoterrorism. This wasn’t some leftist plot to derail offshore drilling, douchebags.
(And hey, for those who refer to this as Obama’s Katrina? Like Katrina, this is a manmade disaster – but the Chernobyl analogy is probably more accurate than a goddamned hurricane destroying poorly constructed levees.)
- Because Halliburton might just be the most evil entity on the face of the planet.
- Because I’m a cranky bitch if I don’t get my annual allowance of shrimp, oysters and redfish. Then again, so is Wyatt Cenac from The Daily Show, who is trying to figure out why God hates New Orleans:
“First Katrina, now this. What’s next? Sentient poboys bent on revenge? Flashed breasts with nuclear warheads?”
No response required, Fred Phelps.
Hasn’t the Gulf Coast suffered enough? Ivan? Katrina? Rita?
Le sigh.
So now that you care, how can you help? (And yes, I fully realize plenty of other End of Daysish events are occurring right now, including the awful flooding in Nashville. RIP, Grand Ol’ Opry.)
First of all, educate yourselves here, here, here, and here.
And find reputable ways to help.
If you want to donate to a good cause, check out the National Audubon Society, which has partnered with National Wildlife Federation, the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana to build a list of volunteers. Click here to register with their data bank. (Hey, more than 10,000 others have.)
Monetary donations to Audubon will help provide cleanup supplies for trained volunteers rehabbing oiled wildlife and carefully cleaning the coastlines.
Those assholes at BP, who are still dodging blame for the malfunction of the blowout preventers on the ocean floor, are pretty busy trying to buy people off for $5,000 along the Gulf Coast. But hey, when they remove their heads from their asses, they’ll be looking to train volunteers in HAZMAT (since handling crude oil is very, very dangerous) and put them to working clean up their spectacular mess. Be mindful of the fact that they’ll probably try to get you to sign away your rights, though.
Ladies and gents with any length hair can actually donate it to create natural “booms” to help soak up oil on the ocean’s surface.
The damage is done – oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, decimating whole ecosystems in its path. So let’s save the alternative energy debate for a minute or five from now and work on how we’re going to fix things now…
…if we even can.
Seriously, BP? Fuck you, you FUCKING FUCKS.
Best,
Feisty Southern Gal
It’s one of those things I can’t even wrap my head around, but I think you helped make it more real.
Thanks for making this about taking action, and thanks for all the links! I’m sharing with everyone I know.
I may be the enemy here! I work in the oilfield.
*ducks*
But what happened in the gulf (and how it’s being handled) astonishes me. I can’t believe how lax the regulations are compared to rigs on land. And despite BP being responsible for this spill, they’re still going to make a massive profit because of stocks. They can pat themselves on the back while the price of oil skyrockets. I mean, hell, the higher oil is, the more I work, but I’m not happy that I’m working more because of this.
You wouldn’t hear of a BOP (Blow Out Preventer) failing on a dry rig. Each rig has multiple BOP’s and many shut off valves. On land, there’s a guy posted at the BOP 24 hours a day. (I understand it may be problematic being underwater and such) The regulations on land rigs are super-strict. When a rig moves location, they cannot leave 1 drop of crude behind. Every person entering the location has to be trained and certified in multiple areas of safety. In order for me to deliver to a location, I have to prove I’m Hazmat certified, H2S certified, Hazardous waste licensed, and have an insurance policy of $1M. There is always a safety man present, and they escort you everywhere. I spend 1 hour trying to get onto a location to do a 5 minute job.
Thanks for writing this. Our UCC conference has been sending church groups down there several times a year since Katrina. Looks like we’ll be keeping our New Orleans connections for longer than we might have thought. I’m not sure when the next one is but I’ll try to get in on it and do what I can!
Everyone back in my home town in Louisiana is freaked. Last week, a patient at my mom’s clinic said oil had already made its way into Bayou Bonfouca.
Fuuuuuuuck. This is such a stupid thing to have happened.
This is so, so sad. I’m so sorry. It really is beginning to feel like the Mayans may have been right…
Chelle,
You’re not the enemy by any stretch – lazy maintenance of the rig and BP’s refusal to install a $500K piece of equipment is what effed things up, and offshore drilling regulations have become much less stringent over the past decade.
Oh, come on you guys – drill, baby, drill, right? Why we shouldn’t allow driling in preserves: Exhibit A. It fucking astonishes me that those afraid of government intervention, largely because “you can’t trust the government,” are so willing to trust private companies to do the right thing when what they really do is turn around and try to buy people off for 5K.
I find it surprising that we can’t get consistent information of the size of the spill. It smells of dishonesty to me.
Funny, maddening, and educational all at once – thanks for a great post!
We need oil more than fucking shrimps, got that ? And fuck the dolphins and turtles too !… you want the U.S to buy all of its fucking gas from the Saudis mofos ?
I say GO BP and thanks for the oil they produce in AMERICA !… sure they may be greedy corporate cocksuckers, but at least they aren’t motherfucking jihadists like the Saudis or fat greasy assholes like Faggot Chavez !!!
BP has done far more damage to the United States than Al Qaeda.
BP itself is not a bad company. They just need employees with integrity and proffesionalism. They have enacted asinine safety rules in an effort to stem damage to
People or the environment. They are so safety concious that they will run You off a platform
If You dont use handrails on the stairs.
I’m going to say what no one else has! Namely- its the gulf coast rednecks that cut corners on a job due to a sense of urgency. Its the “git er done” attitude of “go! Go! Go!” that pushes guys to engage in unsafe activities in order to curry favor from senior guys. There is very much a two faced safety culture offshore where safety regs are preached but blind eyes abound when it comes to deadlines. A very inverse relation exists- the less time to The deadline, the more blind eyes.