floating city

The water in Baptiste Collette Bayou runs south to north below an S in the Mississippi, and the sun can play tricks on one's sense of direction, appearing above the river, even from the east side. We awaken at the north end of Baptiste, just barely offshore, moored to the "floating city", a network of barges in place for the cleanup, anchored a half mile from the jetties at the green 7 and just outside the channel. The "city" contains a crane barge and trash bins for soiled boom, offices and living quarters for about 200 workers who begin to emerge on deck and ignite the day's first cigarettes, the heat already upon us.

We received orders last night, loaded seven pallets of ice in the freezer, more than a thousand bags. We're to run clockwise to SW Pass, off-loading to each of the five task force groups near the entrances to Main Pass, Pass A'loutra, South Pass, and then SW. VHF channel 8 pipes in with "crewboat command" requesting we load more boom; I take my turn at the wheel. I have to bow into a serious current without a bow-thruster, put the boat aside the crane barge. I have to be careful to keep the bow tucked (toward the barge) and the current on the starboard side of the boat. I keep an eye on channel traffic, in case I lose the bow and have to bail. The Mary Jean is a quad-screw, like my regular boat, but the four propellers are aligned differently, set up for an outboard walk. I'm used to doing everything in clutch, but on this older boat that might not work. It does for now and we drift alongside.

Our four workers show up, and its Rick's favorite crew, led by Eduardo; he and Rick are boys, joking and laughing, smoking of course. Three of the four are Mexican immigrants, and today's entertainment will center around the Mexican football effort at the World Cup. With our network of vessels close enough to shore, we use cell phones to contact the work boats, compile coordinates and arrange delivery. At about 07:30, we head ESE into the Gulf.

The deliveries are a simple affair, no cranes or platforms, only shallow water and a constant eye on the depth sounder. We drift as the fishing boats come astern, their framework strung with orange boom in place of net--its soiled and brownish and dripping oil, composing the perennial colored mirror upon a placid surface of sea. Otherwise, there's not much visible oil this close ashore, although I suspect most of the banks and barrier islands are infected.

To the west near shore, a few boats seem to drag net and not boom--they appear to be fishing. Rick talks to one on channel 68, and he says he's "catchin' big, white shrimp". I keep hearing on talk radio about "safe" local seafood, "nose-tested" by inspectors; now I have doubts. The sheen will encroach the furthest at slack tide, but still birds fish the shallows, soaring gulls and fluttering terns and frigates harassing the others. By the end of the day, we've seen maybe a hundred dolphin, apparently smart enough to avoid the oil and stay close to shore--surely fish can't be that smart. On the way back to Baptiste, Mexico is defeated, and the guys are distraught for a spell before smiles return and they're again having a good time. One of them shows me a card trick, his only English words are numbers.

We complete the loop and tie alongside a barge at 18:15. It's steak night at the floating city, and I'm enticed by the warnings of fellow crew on the Mary Jean who insist the dining experience must be akin to that in prison. When Rick and Archie return, Calvin and I hop barges to the mess hall, make our way through a tattooed, rough-looking crowd. The food's not bad for the conditions, high-calorie stuff suited to manual labor. A flat-screen TV projects some nonsense, and the atmosphere purveys amiability through a disparate mix of personality and background.

Task Force 5

More than 60 days in, the cleanup of the Gulf is an emerging colossus, a sprawling network of communication and manpower, of truck and boat. Reporting for duty and returning to Venice, I find an ID network which necessitates standing in line, posing for a camera. I find the overall effort expanding like the creeping sheen itself, like the inexorable footprint of man. I board the boat at 22:00, the m/v Mary Jean. The company of my employ now has multiple vessels engaged in the cleanup, and I'm here to fill in on the Mary Jean, an antique of a crewboat, built 125 ft. long in 1980. I'll be on the night watch, but we're only running by day so I take a pillow to the wheelhouse bench and sleep till nearly sunrise.

We back down slip one in Tiger Pass to the GIS Dock, Rick driving the boat. Morning traffic has improved in my time away, boats like Mary Jean now serving as the middlewoman and hauling supplies to the fish-turned-skimmer boats who remain offshore, ostensibly skimming oil by day, banking up to $5,000/day from BP, anchoring by night among the barrier islands. I make myself useful and handle a line, secure the boat and gangway, and a crew of four board. There's a portable generator on deck, 9,200 lbs, it says, just aft of the wheelhouse, which sits forward on the late model Camcraft, a loading deck aft covered with boards. A 20-foot container/freezer sits on the centerline just aft of the generator, and a forklift drops pallets of groceries on the stern. The crew begins to peal plastic wrapping, load boxes into the freezer.

The lead captain Rick, a veteran of private yachts and ocean crossings in addition to supply boats in the Gulf, resides in Florida but hails from Boston and maintains the accent. As I learn specifics, he appears to coordinate a great deal of logistics, claiming things wouldn't get anywhere without his input. He classifies the cleanup as a "clustah f&%@". With BP picking up the tab for everything, workers are making off with coolers, lifejackets, groceries.

After 10:00 at departure, we run south in the Mississippi bound for Task Force 5, the skimmers divided into five packs, each with a workboat to store boom and coordinate deliveries, pick ups and communication. The small fleets migrate delta waters in search of coastal oil, four of them east of the river toward Breton Sound, one west. Aluminum skiffs, the "responder" boats work the marsh, retrieve soiled boom and take it to the "floating city", a network of barges moored just below the Baptiste Collete jetties on the green side of the channel.

Approaching the Head of Passes where the great river fingers into the Gulf, a new de-con station inspects boat hulls for oil. We take SW Pass, the main ship channel, and its mostly empty, a pleasant cruise interrupted only by small vessels for whom we must kill our wake. We hang a left just past pilot town at the end of the jetties, at the red 4. We head NE and reach the workboat on VHF 68, heave to, and the fishing boats come to us, catching lines stern to stern. Our four hands for the day do the offloading, although I pitch in at times. It's amazingly hot, even on the water, diesel exhaust mixing with water vapor, creating a repulsive blend that sends me gasping. The rest of the guys don't pay it mind, instead smoke cigarettes during breaks in the action.

On the way in and up the river, the Capt. Jim Rhodes, a 40-ft crewboat, makes an urgent call to river traffic on 67, he's taking on water and going down, attempting to cross the one mile stretch from Baptiste Collette to the Venice Jump. I meet the captain later, and he tells me his engines began to stall 1/3 mile above the Jump. He beached and saved the vessel, unfortunately landing on rock just north of the intersection.

last night in New Orleans

I'm stuck in class through the weekend, looking at lists of radio frequencies with an instructor who hates teaching and gets by on sea stories and bad jokes, the old, salty bastard. I stare into a book, and the codes and digits melt together; I'm completely somewhere else. Out by four o'clock, I take the freeway into town, gunning for the Zydeco Festival in the french quarter, getting my fix of radio news-talk which has BP behind closed doors considering insolvency. I speculate, find it unlikely, park the truck by a cemetery on Rampart near the police station. It's a sketchy part of town just north of the quarter, but there's a police station.

I walk east on Rampart to Esplanade and hang a right toward the river. I can almost hear the music, nearly sense its presence in waves when people start streaming in the opposite direction. I arrive to an empty stage in a park, stragglers and discarded cups on the lawn. Without destination, I head uptown until I find live music at an outdoor bar by the french market. I order a hurricane to go and drift, music traipsing in the market-stall rafters, street performers taking root where merchants vacate, a fiddler on a tightrope, a cripple with drumsticks.

I cut to the river bank in front of the St. Louis Cathedral, a motley tourist crowd dispersed on the rocks. New Orleans is a fine destination for bums, one of whom calls to me as I pass, "Hey, what's that ya' drinkin'?" It's a woman, early 20s, sitting next to a guy, both with tattered backpacks. I announce my "hurricane", wind up in conversation and offer them sips. The guy, with long dreds under a cap, takes a shy pull and walks off. The woman is extroverted and starts up like we're old friends. She's telling me she's banned from Moe's Tavern in Charleston, SC, while I idly stare at the dirt on her clothes & limbs. I listen for longer than I feel like, then politely take my leave.

There's a sketchy side to the Big Easy, and no trip to New Orleans is right without a romp down Bourbon. You can be offended or amused; its your choice. But you can't deny it and shouldn't avoid it. Select streets of the french quarter can offer pleasant strolls in admiration of architecture and unique cultural appeal, but you can just as easily see a naked, junkie-whore in a doorway or a toothless, retarded beggar, shaking on the sidewalk. The area just south of Bourbon near Canal is an olfactory abomination of vomit and garbage, piss and jizz.

Had enough, I follow the river by truck, snaking northwestward toward the airport. I've got a bottle of red wine to drink, so I park in an empty industrial lot and climb the levy. There's grass beside the path up top and a good view of the river, multiple container ships underway, to the west a tiny sunset. I pour wine into a thin, styrofoam hotel cup; its all I've got. It's my last night in New Orleans, and tomorrow at midnight, I'll board a smaller, older crew boat, again working out of Venice. We'll be running to the hotel barge where the cleanup crews reside. For the first time, I'll actually be assisting the cleanup effort.

BP Reveals New Strategy

BOURBON ST., NEW ORLEANS -- BP today confirmed they have a new plan for the Gulf of Mexico, which includes filling up up the Gulf with oil to create a giant reservoir for future energy needs. From Key West to Cuba to Cancun, a containment dam will be built to trap the spewing crude from escaping the Gulf, announced BP CEO Tony Hayward, in his pompous British accent. Sea water will then be drained from the Gulf through a filtering process in the dams, which will, according to BP engineers, trap enough oil in the Gulf for generations of human consumption.

"We think this will provide a real, long-term solution for the Gulf of Mexico," said Hayward, nauseatingly glib. "You will all be thanking BP long after the cameras have gone. We never really wanted to cap that well anyway."

To construct the containment dam, BP is promising multiple sub-contracts and is reportedly being pressured to consider a Chinese consortium. Said one US government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, "Asians really need to be involved in a project of this magnitude." With estimates of the flow rate increasing by the minute, projections reflect that the Gulf could be full of oil by as early as 2015.

inspired by the onion, and a night on the town

Research, Rebirth

When collecting data on Grand Isle, Taylor Kirschenfeld, an environmental official from Escambia, Florida, scoured beaches bagging oil and sand, feather and fin; he collected for posterity, he must have assumed, for future generations to continually evaluate scientific data to the benefit of mankind. It must have stuck him in the gut when his brain made the connection that eventually lead Mr. Kirschenfeld to defy orders from a government agency.

Kirschenfeld, also an adjunct instructor in enviro studies at the U of W Florida, found something odd in directions from NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). It turned out NOAA procedure had his baggies bound for a labratory in Texas, TDI-Brooks International, whose number one clientele happens to be: you guessed it, the oil companies. Kirschenfeld sought a waiver to send his samples to a Florida lab also licensed to conduct such tests.

“Everywhere you look, if you look, you start seeing these conflicts of interest in how this disaster is getting handled,” he told the NY Times. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there is just too much overlap between these people.” He's also concerned by another rule. Local animal rescue workers are volunteering to treat birds and to collect data that will be used to calculate penalties for the spill, but federal officials say it has to be done by a company hired by BP! (also NYT)

Politics slithers through all of space/time, and most of us stomach it best we can, but why would NOAA engage in such a relationship? A skeptic could say it has to do with influence peddling, with former BP executives in our government and the relationships they cultivate. People like Sylvia V. Baca, the deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department. She spent 8 years at BP and previously served in the Clinton Administration, and her responsibilities include oversight of the oil and gas, mining and renewable energy operations on public and Indian Lands. Who has the most $ in that mix? It's a common misconception that the oil field runs with only one party.

These thoughts as I traverse terra firma, walking in New Orleans. Passed sundown, I've parked my truck at the bitter end of St. Charles St., beyond railroad tracks in a gravel lot. Basically lost, I check the map to discover I'm next to the river, and sure enough there's a levee a few feet away. I walk to the top and there's the river in a gap between trees, lit by celestials and by the deck lights of a bulk grain-carrier on the opposite bank. There's a cacophony of frog noise at the base. I descend the hill, but the path is fenced and locked.

I head north-east instead, and up St. Charles St., ducking in and out of the trolley way until I find Oak, and people abound in the streets, old timers at a table by the coffee shop, a pretty chill setting. I arrive at the Maple Leaf, a relic of a place, where Rebirth Brass Band plays with energy to a mixed, excited crowd. It's a fantastic show but I've got class in the morning and should be studying. I slip out around midnight, and on the way home I avoid traffic by hugging the levee on a deserted street, passing beneath the Huey P. Long bridge where a change in rules takes place for the boats below. Then houses appear to the right in a 20 mph zone, and I'm creeping, thinking I should be in a taxi. The houses are nice, the setting bucolic, and there's a country club, a huge complex, a castle both defended and threatened by the river. I don't see a traffic light until I'm nearly at the airport. It's a tremendous feat of navigation.

a bird's-eye view

With the flow of oil offshore increasing in previous days, with talk of a government take-over of the emergency effort, it's increasingly difficult to envision daily life as business as usual. It's also progressively easier to feel the frustration of those with lives and livlihoods in the balance.

Yet a morning run is essentially the same as it ever was, current and wind dictating our actions. When conditions cooperate, our job is primarily a pleasure, a boat ride on a sunny day, operations conducted in serene silence or with musical accompaniment from radio/cd. But enter elements: current, fog and traffic in the river, heavy seas offshore; and the coolest veteran will get white-knuckled at the wheel, avoiding close quarters situations in pilotage waters or back-loading cargo at sea beneath a platform crane under threat of a gale.

I'm hit with consecutive days pumping water offshore to other vessels, the larger, steel-hulled work-boats that standby for days or weeks at sea and travel 10 to 12 knots when underway, roughly half the speed we're doing in our aluminum-hulled crew-boat with four Caterpillar 3512 engines. They catch a line off their bow onto a sea buoy, remain tethered and drifting on a floating, polypropylene line, twisted yellow and black maybe 300 feet long. I back our boat from the stern controls until Alex catches a heaving line from the work-boat and they pass a hose. When it's dead calm, we can tie up to the boat, but not today: a steady, 15-knot wind, a 4 to 5-foot swell. I spend the next two hours pivoting and backing, chasing the work-boat back and forth along its constricted path. It's not terribly difficult with a little practice--until the mind wanders...

The story of the leak is preposterous, and it would require a daily summary of various news sources to keep abreast. On the national level, the NY Times has scooped competitors, locating a BP technician who is talking (unauthorized) and leaking company documents, which reveal a long history of trouble with a dubious well. To follow details of the clean up, the Coast Guard response, it takes local radio--someone like Garland Robinette, host of "The Think Tank" on 105.3FM, to stimulate conversation.

I make observations of my own regarding boat movements, and I can say it took weeks for the large clean-up (Responder) vessels to arrive, and when they did, they sat at anchor east of the channel opposite the Venice Jump. The well had been gushing about a month before these vessels left Venice. The dredge Newport, an unlimited tonnage, Army Corps of Engineer vessel, sat at anchor for more than a week upon its arrival in the river. Surely, it could have been dredging berms, not sitting on the hook, but the Coast Guard allegedly restricted their movements by not signing paperwork.

Done pumping water, we're back-loading in South Pass 62 under a yellow monster, a double platform where the Blake 210 drilling apparatus re-works a couple of old wells; depth 370 feet. We shuffle from platform D to platform C, switching cranes, following the comedy of operations that oft becomes the oil field. The current slacks, the wind dies. Alex and I have befriended a roust-about, a grunt worker sent down from a platform to "rig" lifts, hook up the platform crane cable to the cargo on our boat deck. His name is Eddie and he climbs to the bridge to hang out between lifts. With a stature suggesting youth, he's a certified crane operator, under-employed as roust-about in a tight economy, supporting a wife and two kids back in Leesville, La.

A third boat arrives on the scene, and we're standing by again. Eddie explains the drilling process when prompted, displays quite a knowledge of operations. He provides us a different perspective, that seen from his bird's-eye view atop the platform. He offers updates and insight on the slick and the movements of fish and birds, less and less each day. Today, he's most concerned with Tuesday morning's crew change, wants to make sure we'll be here to pick him up. Eddie exhibits a pensive calm, a thoughtful consideration, an acceptance of silence. Sitting with him on the bridge, his soot-covered face relaxes, exposing clean skin beneath wrinkles; he's older than I thought.

The Sulfur Mine

Prior to the Deepwater rig disaster, even a good day offshore in the Gulf of Mexico could be mildly disturbing. Amidst tumbling dolphins and meandering sea turtles, a pervasive despair has always lingered somewhere among the oil & gas rigs that dot the cerulean plain. Today nothing lingers any longer in long stretches of Lousianna's marshlands, more than 100 miles covered in sludge and eerie in the silence of death.

Passed 09:00, our engineer Alex and I start sanding cap-rails beneath a cloudless sky, hoping to finish painting them by noon. At nearly 14:00 with the temp around 100, we're done, relaxing on the bridge when a radio call sends us back into action. It takes little time to crank engines and toss lines, a little more to wait on traffic--your chance to make a break. This time, we're only pulling forward toward the back of slip one, but there's a tug and barge on the west end and I'm forced to "top around", pivot 180, to get the boat under the crane. At 165-ft long, our boat has 10 to 12 feet of clearance broadside in the slip--but only with clear dock space on both sides. The boat pivots quickly and on a dime without current.

We secure under the crane; it looks like we'll wait, I cut the engines. It takes hours some days for all the trucks to come and go, a giant red crane, maybe 5 stories tall, swapping lifts from truck to boat. Alex hitches a ride to the store for cigarettes; he's met an out-of-work drifter living out of his car in the dusty parking lot, waiting for weather to clear and for his job to start on the clean up. Enough work done for the day, I chill on the bridge and watch the shuffling boats, listen to the local radio news that consumes my life. I check lifts as they arrive for destination: Ensco 87, a jack-up drilling rig, a mobile, three-legged monster. It's not a typical run for us, and I've got two prior locations charted. I call another boat for verification.

"It's in Main Pass 296, you'll see it just passed the sulfur mine."
I look at Alex, did he say "sulfur mine?" Apparently.

The sea floor of the Gulf has been divided into a grid and sold off to the oil companies. These boxes are designated on nautical charts with magenta lines and take up nine square nautical miles, each block with an area name and number. The seabed off Virginia was destined for sale before the recent disaster, but plans are delayed. I find MP 296 on the chart and plot a course. It'll be the furthest east I've been in the Gulf, having run the boat from Galveston, TX to the Mississippi and back multiple times. For someone who used to watch whales in the Sea of Cortez, drive ice tours in Alaska, I accept small victories at work in the Gulf, and going someplace I've never been is a good day. The oil slick will be out there; it's taken over the waters east of Baptiste Collette. It's now one, giant slick. But taking the boat offshore for sunset is preferable to sitting at the dock, and I'll be relieved of the watch at 18:00.

When dock workers go for chains and binders to secure the deck load, it's time to roll. I sign paperwork and bring the boat off the dock, trying to be patient, letting fishing boats get settled. It's also easy to get worked up and tense if someone is threatening a collision. I once gave a wide berth to a shrimp boat in the Cameron jetties on the Calcasieu River, where he's not supposed to be fishing. "Thank you, Cap," he said. "We'll pay our child support this month."

When I'm relieved of the watch at 18:00, we're barreling east toward the sulfur mine, making 23 knots with a deck load, consuming about 300 gallons of diesel per hour with throttles on the dash. I'm free to observe from deck, to watch the Gulf go by with Alex and Chris, the younger guys, engineers. They smoke cigarettes, appreciate the adventure of travel at sea. We watch the sun spill into western clouds, and there's the sulfur mine, a rusty, orange behemoth, three platforms connected by cat-walk, all of it ablaze in the amber of sunset.