DAUPHIN ISLAND – We arrived on the scene here before sunset on Friday at the point where the massive BP oil slick is supposed to hit Alabama first, the Western tip of Dauphin Island south of Mobile.
There’s already a black streak in the sand on the primary dune line here from routine pollution on this side of Mobile Bay.
So far, the readiness to handle a disaster of this magnitude appears not just inadequate, but non-existant. There are only 60 miles of boom to cover 300 miles of coast, according to a spokesman for the town of Dauphin Island, and it is useless with waves of three feat or higher.
With storms coming in over the Gulf for the next few days out of the southwest, the waves could top six to eight feet or more. There are no plans in place to do ANYTHING to try and stop the oil from coming ashore here.
The clouds on Friday looked like the sky over Mordor in the final episode of Lord of the Rings, a harbinger of a looming disaster of epic proportions. This will no doubt dwarf the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William’s Sound Alaska in March of 1989, and without exaggeration, will be called the largest and worst environmental disaster in American history.
An oil spill that threatened to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez disaster spread out of control and drifted inexorably toward the Gulf Coast on Thursday as fishermen rushed to scoop up shrimp and crews spread floating barriers around marshes. The spill was both bigger and closer than imagined – five times larger than first estimated, with the leading edge just three miles from the Louisiana shore. Authorities said it could reach the Mississippi River delta by Thursday night, according to the AP.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is taking action to support the joint response to the Mississippi Canyon 252 oil spill with experienced specialists, land managers and support personnel.
Booms to capture and deflect anticipated oil are being deployed at Breton National Wildlife Refuge, where thousands of brown pelicans and shorebirds are currently nesting. The Service also is initiating Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration activities in this incident to assess and address the long-term damage to impacted resources.
Service employees from national wildlife refuges, environmental contaminants, and a Service aircraft have been part of the response effort from the beginning and will continue to work with federal, state and local counterparts and conservation organizations, the U.S. Coast Guard and all other contributors in this response effort. The Coast Guard has the lead overall for this response effort.
As the encroachment of oil into coastal zones appears imminent, primary concerns include potential impacts to 20 coastal National Wildlife Refuges within the possible trajectory of the spill. In addition, this is the avian nesting season and sea turtle nesting season is approaching. Gulf sturgeon are congregating in coastal waters for upstream migration and manatees are migrating back into summer areas more widespread than winter gathering spots in warm springs. All of these resources could be affected by the spill.
It’s a hellish scene: Giant sheets of flame racing across the Gulf of Mexico as thick, black smoke billows high into the sky. This, though, is no Hollywood action movie. It’s the real-life plan to be deployed just 20 miles from the Gulf Coast in a last-ditch effort to burn up an oil spill before it could wash ashore and wreak environmental havoc.
Crews late Wednesday afternoon started a test burn to see how the technique was working. Rig operator BP PLC (BP.) had planned to continue the oil fires after the test, but as night fell, no more were lit. The burns were not expected to be done at night, and the Coast Guard said crews could resume work Thursday morning if the weather cooperated.
About 42,000 gallons of oil a day are leaking into the Gulf from the blown-out well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Eleven workers are missing and presumed dead. The cause of the explosion has not been determined, according to AP.
Just two days before Earth Day, a few weeks after President Obama’s call to increase drilling in off-shore areas, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, 45 miles off of Louisiana’s coast, near the Breton and Delta National Wildlife Refuges.
Tragically, it appears that 11 missing crewmembers have been killed. In addition to the human tragedy, the environmental crisis is unfolding as I type this.
The massive oil slick has grown to over 2,000 square miles. It hasn’t come aground in sensitive coastal areas yet, but it is only a matter of time. The marine impacts could be enormous due to the massive volume of the leak, currently estimated at 42,000 gallons a day.
The area of the spill is important habitat for endangered sperm whales, many species of threatened and endangered sea turtles, the Gulf’s mysterious whale shark population, and is close to blue fin tuna spawning grounds. This is an environmental disaster of epic proportions.
We need the President to demand every appropriate federal agency is helping monitor and study the marine impacts while cleaning up the mess in the shortest possible time. It’s also time to reconsider expanding oil drilling on our coasts.
About 20 people showed up at the Brookwood Mall Books-A-Million in Birmingham Tuesday to get a signed copy of former Bush political aide Karl Rove’s book, Courage and Consequence, a memoir of his time in the White House designed to try and repair the legacy of a president some scholars are already calling about the worst in American history.
The most prominent person to show up for a signed copy was none other than William “Bill” Pryor, the former Alabama attorney general who first started trying to investigate then-Governor Don Siegelman in 1998.
As a political payoff, Bush appointed Pryor to a judgeship on the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta in 2004 while Congress was in recess, although he was later confirmed by the Senate after a deal was negotiated by Senator John McCain’s “Gang of 14.”
Yes, that’s the same Bill Pryor Rove tried to deny knowing before the House Judiciary Committee, although Rove’s political consulting company ran his campaign for attorney general in 1998. When Pryor walked up and Rove saw him, he smiled real big and said, “Hey, Bud!”
Outside the mall and across the street, about the same number of people, about 20 by my count, showed up to protest Rove’s visit, sporting T-shirts with the slogan “Free Don Siegelman” and carrying signs indicating Rove is the real criminal who should be spending time in federal prison for his participation in high crimes and misdemeanors against the country and the Constitution by the administration of George W. Bush and Vice President Dick “Shotgun” Cheney.
Frank Mathews, a former radio talk show host and aide to jailed Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford, led the protest with his group the Outcast Voters League.
Inside, reporters were allowed to take pictures and ask questions for about 10 minutes before Rove started the book signing.
Let’s all remember the Bush Years one more time. The 2000 election debacle, the ill-conceived Iraq War, the financial meltdown, Hurricane Katrina, Afghanistan and Iran.
With the approval of only 22 percent of Americans, Republicans running for reelection would rather Bush stayed out of site down there in Texas, cutting brush or something. Now Democrats can run the Obama vs. Bush election all over again…
Robert Kennedy Jr., interviewed at a Climate Change Rally by Velvet Revolution, says Massey Coal owner should go to jail for massive violations of the law that led to the 29 coal miners’ deaths.
As the New York Times recently wrote:
Twenty days later and twenty miles away, they came to say farewell to the dead of Upper Big Branch on Sunday, the widows and orphans, the friends and neighbors, and a president of the United States. The faces of the 29 men killed in the nation’s worst coal mining disaster in four decades stared out at their loved ones, now just a series of photographs…
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
