Finally Made It to the Gulf

This morning at just after 5 am, I climbed into a car with Andy and Marilyn and headed to Slidell. Slidell is a small town on the other side of Lake Ponchartrain, and it's where the boat belonging to the Lake Ponchartrain Institute was moored. Our mission was to travel from Slidell up to Cat Island and back through Lake Borgne stopping at least 16 times to see what oil contamination situation was. It was my first time getting really out of New Orleans and into the wetlands, and it was breathtaking.
Dawn just about anywhere is lovely, and heading out in our Evinrude-powered boat watching that huge, orange orb come up over the marsh made me understand why my roommate Chris talks about living outside of New Orleans. Honestly, after that early morning boat ride across Lake Ponchartrain and into Lake Borgne, I also started thinking about how I might be able to organize my life to be out in this area more.
The previous day, a ship hit an old well head in Jefferson Parish, sending a spout of oil and natural gas pluming up out of the water. It was a reminder that while the Deepwater Horizon disaster is disproportionately large, there are wells all over the region, and accidents like the one that re-opened this well head happen with relative frequency. So shutting down and cleaning up the BP disaster is important, but it's only one piece of a much bigger and more complicated. Only yesterday I learned that that New Orleans Saints owe their black & gold color scheme to the oil industry. It makes sense, but I didn't know it.
Unlike other inspection missions earlier this summer, this one was uneventful. The engine worked throughout the day, and the weather was crystal clear. The biggest hazard we faced was sunburn from the reflection off the glass-like water. And believe me, it was a hazard. Although I was pretty much entirely covered by a hat, bandana, long shirt, and jeans, my neck still managed to get burned. Amazing, I know.
It was interesting to take this tour of the area and see all of the boom that has been laid out, some of it now crumpled up into useless circles on the water, some of it washed up onto shore. As we went through an area where pylons had been planted in the bottom of the lake so that boom could be strung between them, I noticed that there were some super solid inflated black booms and some less solid orange ones. The black ones looked like a string of sausages or bombs strung together. The orange ones looked like squishy bricks kids might play with in the water. Marilyn noted that the black boom belonged to the Navy whereas the orange stuff came from the Coast Guard. She pointed out that the quality of the equipment makes it easy to see who's getting more money.
On the way back, heading from Oyster Bay to Elephant Pass, we passed a pod of dolphins and stopped to play for a bit. It was an incredible experience. There was at least one mother dolphin swimming closely to her young one. And another dolphin kept swimming right up at the prow of the boat, thwarting basically all my attempts to get a picture of it by popping up and then submerging again. At a certain point, I got smart and put the camera on the video function so that these moments wouldn't be lost.

Life Goes On

Last weekend I was in Wisconsin. It was great. The weather was perfect, although clearly my time in an un-air conditioned house in New Orleans has changed my perspective on what that means. Flying back Wednesday morning, there were large dark masses lurking in the waters of Lake Ponchartrain and Lake Borgne. I figured, however, that they weren't oil since I hadn't heard reports of such large amounts of oil sneaking underwater all the way up to New Orleans. What I learned later that day, however, is that while those masses probably weren't oil, 1,000 pounds of tar balls had been pulled out of the lake in the preceding days.
So as this catastrophe continues and people start to really have anxiety about what will happen to them, life in New Orleans does go on. This evening I went to a fundraising benefit for The Mother-n-Law Lounge. The owner of the Lounge had announced that it was going to close several weeks ago, prompting an outcry from aficionados across the land. Indeed, friends of mine traveled from North Carolina to be at this event. OK. They do have ulterior motives: they are making an audio documentary about blues musicians in Southern Louisiana, and this piece will become a segment in that project.
In any case, the point is that, in spite of the ongoing train wreck that threatens everyone in the region, parts of life do continue as before. One woman even told me yesterday that since the situation is ongoing, she deals with all the issues facing her Native American tribe with less urgency now than she did two months ago. If you're in it for the long haul, you have to be able to survive the haul.
It is also hurricane season, and so, even as life goes on, people ask themselves very seriously whether they will be able to continue living here if, for example, there is a storm surge that raises water levels 10-20 feet and carries all the oil and crap from the Gulf to our roofs and front doors. Rebuilding a house that the wind has knocked around is one thing, rebuilding a house that has been soaked in oil AND knocked around is another.
Has anyone mentioned the "firecane" scenario to y'all? Y'know, where a spark during a hurricane lights all the oil in the Gulf and fire and sucks all the air out of the surrounding area while scorching it? New Orleanians definitely have an affinity for dark humor, but given the circumstances, it doesn't seem like such a bad coping mechanism.
Having spent months working on a story about the issues facing homeowners who applied for help from the Road Home program, I doubt that any real changes will be made to the way that emergencies are handled. The Road Home was a program created to help homeowners rebuild after hurricanes Katrina & Rita. It is a well-known disaster of its own. What I mean about doubting changes is that the state of Louisiana outsourced a lot of work to private companies who had a profit motive in their rebuilding assistance. I cringe at the thought of seeing a repeat, perhaps around different issues and not homeownership, with this spill.
Anyway, as all of this goes on, I'm actually doing well. There's a market for my journalism all of a sudden, and, twisted as it is, that means that I am getting to do work that I enjoy and hopefully sharing some important information.