Yesterday the crew attended a town hall forum in Buras, LA, conducted by the Secretary of the Navy, who was tapped by the President to lead the recovery effort along the Gulf Coast. The recovery plan will focus on restoring this area, one of the nation’s vital sources of seafood, natural gas, and oil, both economically and environmentally. 1/3 of the seafood eaten by Americans is caught in the Gulf Coast, and 16% of the country’s natural gas comes from this region.
The town hall served as a preliminary solicitation of ideas from the residents of Plaquemines Parish. Many here believe that any recovery plan not only needs to resolve oil spill cleanup and restoration, but also wetlands preservation and hurricane protection. Louisiana loses scores of square miles of wetlands every year, due to development of the oil and natural gas industries and other erosion. If oil from the spill kills the grasses in these wetlands, the erosion process will be accelerated.
The other question is how to revitalize the fishing industry in Plaquemines. Though the Obama administration and BP seem to be suggesting that the oil spill has been cleaned up and the seafood is safe to eat, the story here among the fishermen is that the oil has just disappeared from view. The chemical dispersant that BP sprayed has removed oil from the surface, but it has sunken into the mud and sediment along the ocean floor. All you have to do is circle a boat in the same area in the wetlands two or three times to churn out a nice sheen of oil. One fisherman filled a Gatorade bottle with oil he found in the wetlands and brought it to the town hall, offering to bring anyone from the government or the media out into the wetlands and expose how it has been accumulating.
