Follow-up to Video: The Gulf of Mexico Death Throes – Incredible Footage of the State of the Gulf Waters and the End Of Gulf Wildlife [Must Watch]Author David Helvarg takes a flight from the shores of Alabama to the site of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion. What he finds is disturbing.
Ten years ago I flew out to a BP Deepwater platform in the Gulf of Mexico to report on offshore drilling and was amazed I could see oil rigs all the way to the horizon. Now I’m appalled that from 2,000 feet up I can see heavy oil slicks all the way to the horizon.
On Monday, June 21, I flew out of Sonny Callahan Airport in Fairhope, Ala., with pilot Tom Hutchings of SouthWing, a nonprofit group whose T-shirt logo reads “Conservation through Aviation.”
Tom is an angular biologist with an MBA who loves to fly. John Wathan, who joined us, shooting photos and video through the open luggage door, is the Hurricane Creek Keeper, a member of Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s environmental group. An ex-construction contractor, John looks more like a former Hells Angel than a tree-hugger with his full white beard and red, white and blue headscarf.
John’s been flying with Tom since the third day after BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig sank and the Gulf of Mexico erupted with tens of thousands of barrels of oil per day, creating one of the most devastating eco-disasters in recent history.
In the days since I’d cut my “Saved by the Sea” book tour short to return to the Gulf, I’d been visiting oiled beaches, oiled pelicans, oil-soaked wetlands and the Louisiana Incident Command Center at a BP facility outside Houma where private security guards made me erase a digital photo of the building (I re-shot it from a public road). Scientists I know in Mississippi and Alabama both had the same reaction when I called them, laughing and saying they heard from me only during disasters (I’d last visited them after Hurricane Katrina).
We take off behind a Coast Guard Sentry aircraft and are quickly 1,000 feet over Mobile Bay.
“I’ve got some color, I got red in the bay,” John reports from the back of the plane, looking down where some oil appears to have floated in despite the bay’s freshwater outflow that has kept most oil at bay and off the state’s beaches until this week. Two miles out we spot our first wind-drift streaks of oil. 12 miles out the oil becomes more pronounced like the speckled fat in marbled meat.
“The water looks so unnatural the way the light comes off it now. It’s a dull yellow rather than shiny and sparkly reflections,” Tom notes. He’s been flying these waters for 30 years.
“It’s flattened out the white caps [small waves],” John points out. “It’s like someone stretched Saran Wrap down on top of the water.”
Arcanum Deep Secrets 