Gulf of Mexico: “There is no life out there”

Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge Manager Jereme Phillips reports oil on a refuge beach in Alabama in June of 2010. Three years later, the hits just keep on coming. (Photo: Jennifer Strickland USFWS)

The Gulf Oil spill is old news, right? 2010? Over and done with. The seafood industry has recovered. tourists are back, BP has kept its promises to make things right.

We know that because that’s what the incessant BP commercials on television are telling us. BP seems to believe its own commercials, because it announced in June that it and the Coast Guard were ending regular patrols of the Gulf Coast (except for Louisiana) looking for washed up oil. It did this, it said in its exuberant announcement, because of its “extraordinary progress in cleaning up the Gulf,” which, it declared, is almost back to normal. Who you gonna believe? BP’s commercials, or your lyin’ eyes?

In June a 20-ton mat of “oiled material” was found off Louisiana, and another two-ton mat was discovered a week ago.  Tarballs are a daily sight on the curve of beaches from Louisiana to Key West. Almost all of the oil in these materials appears to have come from the Deepwater Horizon blowout. And before BP virtually shut down its cleanup operations in June, nearly three million pounds of the gunk had been collected — in just six months, off the Louisiana coast alone. That’s the bad news. Now for the really bad news.

The ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico appears to be collapsing. The top end of that system — crabs, oysters, shrimp, finfish — provides food for humans and raw material for an enormous complex of industries, all of which are in serious, perhaps mortal, decline. Some of the evidence:

• The oyster season opened in Louisiana on October 15th.  Veteran oysterman Brad Robin says that 70 per cent the harvest grounds are “dead or mostly dead.” He’s only using two of the ten boats in his fleet, he says, because “there is no life out there.” And it’s not just the oysters, he adds: “We’re seeing things we’ve never seen before.”
• Mississippi oystermen, who used to harvest 30 sacks a day, routinely, this year are struggling to find six.
• Grouper fishing takes are sharply down all along the Florida west coast, and many grouper caught have tar balls in their stomachs.
• The crab harvest is far below pre-blowout norms, and many crabs taken have deformities such as holes in their shells.
• Substantial numbers of shrimp taken are not marketable because they have large tumors or other deformities, such as a lack of eyes.
• 212 dolphins and other marine mammals have died this year in the northern Gulf. BP oil is a prime suspect.

There’s much more, of course, as any logical person would expect in the aftermath of a dump of 200 million gallons of crude oil into a pristine estuarine ecosystem. Numerous studies have chronicled the harm to corals, micro-organisms, and various species of fish — toxic, carcinogenic and genetic harm.

But in the happy TV world of BP — which is vigorously down-playing the size of the spill, rejecting claims for compensation, shutting down its cleanup, and arguing in Federal court that it should not even be fined for the spill — all is well along the Gulf Coast. No scenes of oiled feet, cancerous crabs, eyeless shrimp, dead dolphins. No interviews with bankrupt fishermen or desperate seafood wholesalers. Not here, on BPTV.

But so far, only Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana seems to have been offended by the fact that BP is “spending more money on television commercials [$500 million last year} than they have on actually restoring the natural resources they impacted.” But as Governor Jindal understands very well when campaigning on his own behalf, perception beats reality every time.

Hear the podcast version.

– Tom Lewis, The Daily Impact

11 Comments on "Gulf of Mexico: “There is no life out there”"

Dave Thompson on Mon, 28th Oct 2013 8:28 pm 



The rampant destruction continues, Gas prices are down, all is well………………………..

Kenz300 on Mon, 28th Oct 2013 8:58 pm 



Quote — “BP is “spending more money on television commercials [$500 million last year} than they have on actually restoring the natural resources they impacted.”

————————–

That say’s it all……..

Norm on Mon, 28th Oct 2013 8:59 pm 



The life will re-evolve. Only takes 20 million years. No problem.

J-Gav on Mon, 28th Oct 2013 10:07 pm 



“Perception beats reality every time.” Well, almost every time. Which is why we’re on our way to killing it all (i.e. non-human life forms but humans aren’t worth much either in financialized capitalism’s type of reasoning.) And so we risk being not far behind in the holocaust. Heads far enough up our asses so we can watch TV through our belly-buttons.

bobinget on Mon, 28th Oct 2013 11:24 pm 



Twenty million years is a gross exaggeration some kind of number ‘Norm’ pulled out of his butt.
I’ll be you, right now, in Five Million Years everything will be back to normal-;)

The fact is this terrible BP spill is not the last great insult to the GOM. There will be more ‘spills’ additional fertilizer run-off, over heating, dead-zones.

Deniers, the exact same men who call AGW a hoax,
also claim everything is already ‘back to normal’.
Early on, with Macondo oil spewing, these guys were looking for just the right sort of bacteria that through some magic known best to off-shore oil people was going to actually ‘eat-up’ this entire mess. Show-nuff
less then a year later those ‘bacteria had done their job’. That, according to these so called ‘investors’.

GregT on Mon, 28th Oct 2013 11:40 pm 



The human race is nothing more than a parasitic infestation to the Earth. She will either eradicate us, or we will kill her before she can.

BillT on Tue, 29th Oct 2013 1:01 am 



GregT, we can kill off most of the life on Earth, but we will not hurt Earth. She already has our replacement somewhere in the system and it will just adapt and thrive in a few million years. After all, it was 65 million years ago that most life was wiped out by a comet. That opened the door for us to exist.

That 65 million years was less than 2% of the 4.5 billion years the Earth has existed. Earth could go through many such cycles before the sun claims it for the last time. Only sure thing is that life will NOT resemble anything of our time and we will NOT be part of it.

rollin on Tue, 29th Oct 2013 2:43 am 



This is much easier to get your head around than global warming. This is now, this is death and distortion right in front of our eyes. And still we get in our cars, aiding and abetting this killing, these lies.
Who would want to eat anything out of the Gulf anyway? It been poisoned with two toxins, the oil and the dispersant.

Norm on Tue, 29th Oct 2013 6:10 am 



Ya know whats funny? We all forgot about it. So there was those redneck clowns in Utah, pushed hard and knocked over a geologically interesting rock. Theoretically speaking, they had a point, it was dangerous and it is nasty when some naturally occurring rock falls over and pins you, severing your lower body or a limb (TV show, ‘i shouldnt be alive’, movie ‘127 hours’ either very gross to watch). Trick was, the whole area had hazardous rocks, so its hard to complain about just one. But thats not the point, lets say those redneck clowns were just a couple of jerks.

Now then, you ould put that rock back, with a suitable repair, in a couple of days. Core drill it, add a stainless steel post or two, a good solid engine hoist would lift the rock back into position. Make ’em pay for it. Be fair now. Its a $25,000 job. Not a nickel more.

So thats that. But what’s the plan? Toss em into prison. File charges. Criminals. Felons. You’re under arrest. For a rock that can be repaired with a peg.

Fast forward to the murderous sinister twisted con-men, who deliberately blew up the BP rig (all fully documented, names, transcripts, everything). An oil slick that can be seen from outer space, sheeeeitttt you could see it from Pluto. Think they go to jail? Think they gotta pay $25,000 like for a metallic repair job on a rock? Bwaaa haaa haaaa haaa haaaaa !

Throw the guy into prison who littered a gumwrapper, but the guy who blew up a nuclear plant? Oh those con-men get a couple billion bucks of stock options, personal dwellings you can see from outer space, and their own country.

If you don’t wanna fix such failures of judicial systems, as I just so clearly sketched, then what do you wanna fix anyway.

Norm on Tue, 29th Oct 2013 6:14 am 



What I’m saying is, there is no obviously responsible BP authority going to prison. But you can bet a couple of dummies in Utah are goin to prison. Now compare the crimes involved, as well as the repair-ability. Does that make sense? Ya dig, man?

mike on Tue, 29th Oct 2013 8:27 am 



So the GOM is dead from oil or more likely corexit, and the Pacific is slowly dying from radiation for the next few thousand years. What next chaps, Atlantic is it? lets try to kill all those Phytoplankton and rid ourselves of 50% of that evil oxygen floating about invisible to us. HUMANS ARE UTTERLY FUCKING STUPID!