Alabama’s Local Boat Captains Not Called

Glynn Wilson

BP vice president Bob Fryar faces the media and local officials on Saturday by Perdido Pass in Orange Beach, Alabama.

by Glynn Wilson

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — The British Petroleum corporation is hiring illegal immigrant convict labor to clean the beaches along the Gulf Coast instead of contracting with local fishermen who are out of work due to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as they promised publicly.

In trying to use public relations to cover up the massive mess it’s causing, BP officials are saying the company has hired unemployed workers to help with the beach cleanup effort here.

But as time goes on and the oil gusher continues to spew in the water, filling up the Gulf with it’s toxic gumbo of light, sweet crude and chemical dispersants, local officials are becoming increasingly hostile to the company line and demanding action.

The Unified Command in Mobile announced Saturday the first deployment of the so-called Qualified Community Responder program to put unemployed workers in the counties affected by the spill.

“Working closely with the Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida unemployment offices, unemployed workers have been hired to help with the cleanup effort. A similar program exists in Louisiana,” BP said in a statement issued after the press conference in Orange Beach Saturday afternoon.

But Edward H. Carroll, a member of the Orange Beach city council and a retired paper mill safety specialist, said the company man BP finally sent to coordinate the cleanup effort, Bob Fryar, a vice president, was not telling the truth.

“They are from the state prison,” Carroll said, and Alabama’s governor Bob Riley knows it.

Glynn Wilson

Two of these three workers on the beach in Gulf Shores by the Gulf State Park fishing pier could not speak English. When asked if they were “volunteers,” the other one just smiled and cast a sideways glance at the boss, a BP contractor with a steely-eyed glare.

Carroll said if he could find a judge to issue the order, he would have BP officials arrested and locked up in the local jail until they come up with a solution to saving the coast from their slimy disaster.

The company claims 400 trained workers in Florida and Alabama began cleaning affected beaches this weekend, with the long-term plan being to train 4,500 workers to cover three states, with 1,500 in Alabama and Mississippi and 1,600 in Florida.

They will cleanup shorelines by with rakes and shovels, front end loaders where necessary. They will use power washers to clean rocks, but they are not trained to deal with wildlife impacted by the oil. There are specialists for that, the company said.

After Fryar made his pitch talking about how “pleased” he was with the entire BP operation and how things are going, including the questionable amount of oil being capture by the company’s latest attempt to cap it, Robert Craft, the mayor of Gulf Shores, asked Fryar to go see the beaches himself and then try to tell people here what the company is doing is “effective.”

When Fryar tried to make the case that he understood the local “frustration,” the mayor of Orange Beach, Tony Kennon, jumped in.

“I don’t think you sense our frustration,” he said. “If you sensed our frustration, you would have been here a lot sooner.”

It is taking hours sometimes for workers to show up when a report of oil on the beach comes in. It took two and a half hours to get a crew down by the Gulf State Park fishing pier on Saturday. The mayor himself called in a report at 6:40 a.m. and said as far as he knew, there was still no cleaning crew on the Orange Beach public beach when the press conference started an hour late at about 2 p.m.

“What you say and what you do, Mr. Fryar, with all due respect, are two entirely different things,” Kennon said. “It does nothing for me to instill confidence that you guys really and sincerely care about what’s going on down here on the ground.”

Town officials have been asking for a BP official to consult with them since the beginning of May, and asking for a list of local boat captains they can call on in the cleanup effort. No list has been forthcoming — because they are using convict labor.

While boat captains are typically used in water-going cleanup efforts such as skimming oil off the sea surface, they are also being used in Louisiana to help clean marshes.

“It’s really aggravating for someone to walk in here who’s never been to our town and put on a pretty, rosy picture, when it’s just not the case,” the mayor said.

As an example of how the BP and federal response here is not working, he said a local team spotted a huge mat of oil heading for the beach and got it all boomed together in the Gulf. Yet they could not get a BP skimmer in time to stop it from making landfall.

“That’s inexcusable” the mayor said. “There’s no such things as overkill in a situation like this. I don’t care how much BP has to spend. I want the resources here to handle any situation. That is their job.”

He said BP is dragging its feat in paying claims to those who have lost business and can’t work.

“I want them to start writing checks right now,” he said. “They’re trying to hold back a hundred dollars because they’re scared there might be one dollar of fraud. I don’t have time for that nonsense and neither do our businesses.”

No matter how little oil actually hits the beach here, he said, “Our economy is being devastated.”

Glynn Wilson

A fishing boat making its way through Perdido Pass near the Florida line in Orange Beach, Alabama.

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Tags: Alabama's Local Boat Captains Not Called, BP is Hiring Illegal Immigrant Convict Labor in Beach Cleanup

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 6th, 2010 at 4:49 pm and is filed under BP Oil Spill, Environment News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.