Black Death (part V)

This entry is the fifth of a several-part installment on my coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Feel free to comment and ask questions. You can read all of the current entries here: http://itsjustlight.com/?cat=105

After spending a sleepless night in Biloxi, Mississippi I pulled myself back to the realm of the living and returned to the road at 5am as the stars were beginning to fade into the sunrise. I followed Highway 90 west along Mississippi’s coast, crossing over the new Saint Louis Bay Bridge, reopened in 2007 after being left looking like a collapsed line of dominoes by Hurricane Katrina. On the western side of the bridge, the coast turns south and Highway 90 continues inland, turning into 607 and eventually intersecting with I-10. Continuing west and then southwest on 10, I passed by Slidell, my car bouncing up and down on the infamously bumpy stretch of highway that tests the shocks of any vehicle and then over Lake Pontchartrain on the new Twin Span Bridge, recently constructed to replace the old span that was also left in ruins by Katrina. I was pleased to see that New Orleans looked more and more like its grand old self, having still appeared in bad shape the last time I passed through the city a few years earlier. Grass no longer grew from the roads, signs no longer were covered with rust, skyscrapers were no longer windowless, and while I still passed by neighborhoods filled with abandoned, flood damaged homes, things were definitely looking up.

Tragically, just over 50 miles to the south of the city the beaches, marshes, and bays were being inundated by a vast sea of crude oil. I faced a quick decision; whether to head first to Venice, a relatively isolated town 80 miles to the southeast, or to Grand Isle, 110 miles due south. Separated by only about 30 miles of water, the two towns are geographically neighbors, but require a four hour drive to travel from one to the other. I made my choice to head to the closer Venice, departing New Orleans around 10:30am. I drove south on Highway 23, which skirts the western bank of the mighty Mississippi river.

As I neared Boothville, ten miles north of Venice, the air was filled with the deep, resonating sound of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters taking off and landing. I followed their path across the sky to a landing site at Fort Jackson and watched as a Louisiana National Guard Black Hawk passed low over my vantage point and touched down for refueling. Half a mile south on the right side of Highway 23, I could see even more Black Hawks hovering in the air, waiting their turn to pick up massive sandbags to transport to nearby barrier islands and sandbars to fill in gaps caused by coastal erosion in an effort to halt the flow of oil into the marshes and bays. I quickly drove to the staging area, located off Compactor Road. Thousands of enormous sandbags covered the ground, each weighing 3,000 pounds. I photographed the scene, capturing the helicopters as they lined up, long cables trailing beneath their metal bodies, and then descended to six feet above the ground, allowing a guardsman to hook a load of two sandbags to the cable. Sandbags secured to the cable, the guardsman would dash away to avoid the rotor wash that flings stinging grains of sand and debris through the air like shrapnel as the twin 1,890 hp General Electric turboshaft engines power up and slowly lift the massive helicopter and its payload out of a hover and high into the air.

In sharp contrast to the disorganized cleanup efforts taking place at the beaches, the sandbagging effort was moving like a well-oiled machine. Like any other disaster, the Deepwater Horizon leak was spawning all sorts of conspiracy theories, many of them including tall tales about military involvement and others even insisting that there was no oil spill. Some theorists were peddling tales of martial law being imposed and telling of heavily armed convoys of “battle hardened” soldiers. Well, there I was, standing under the black helicopters themselves, yet what I saw was a much different tale. This operation was going smoothly and efficiently and unlike the poorly equipped civilian contractors on the beach who often seemed to spend more time under the shade of tents than actually cleaning up oil, these soldiers were hustling in the heat. Ten Black Hawks, two twin rotor Columbia 107-II helicopters (the commercial variant of the Boeing Vertol CH-46 Sea Knight), and a Sikorsky S-61 (the commercial variant of the Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King) were working all day, every day. At the time of this article the National Guard has airlifted more than twenty-four million pounds of sandbags. While I’m pleased to see something being done, the actual effectiveness of the sandbags is up for debate; they do not form a completely solid barrier and oil seems to find its way over and through these sandbags with relative ease. If and when the oil leak is eventually stopped, Louisiana will be faced with yet another dilemma; how to remove tens of millions of pounds of oil contaminated sandbags.

I drove back to Highway 23 and headed north about thousand feet, pulling into an old hunting camp on the west side of the highway that I had noticed earlier and where I thought I might find a better vantage point. Another photographer was already parked there, his car window rolled down with a long, white zoom lens protruding. I walked past his still-running vehicle and climbed a wooden ladder into a hunting blind that rose about 10 feet above the ground. To my left I could see the helicopters taking off and landing and in front of me spread a vast field of waist-high brush. Below me, an enormous speckled kingsnake, known to the locals as a salt-and-pepper snake, slithered slowly through a pile of dumped refuse. Having never been content to photograph the action from afar I wanted to get closer to the staging area. Cognizant that there were likely less benign snakes taking shelter from the mid-day heat(copperheads, water moccasins, coral snakes, and three species of rattle snakes call Louisiana home), I left the blind behind and entered the brush, picking my way cautiously through thick grass, vines, and trash toward a mound of dirt about 500 feet away that looked like it might offer a perfect place to photograph from. A merciless sun glared down from the sky, huge Cumulus clouds looming tantalizingly in the distance. I was drenched with sweat by this point and I could only imagine how the uniformed guardsmen were feeling.

I finally reached the little hill I had seen and clambered up the side, camera and lens bag swinging painfully against my hip, as my shoes sunk into the loose dirt. I paused to wipe the stinging perspiration from my eyes and then began to photograph. My position put me directly in front of the staging area and gave me a perfect view of the helicopters as they came in to collect their sandbags. It also put me directly under their path away from the staging area and I felt a knot forming in my stomach as the six thousand pounds of sandbags spun on their cables less than fifty feet above me. I could see the pilots of the 107-II’s peering below their massive crafts out of the protruding bubbles that flank the main cockpit windows, watching as the guardsmen hooked the bags onto the cable and then signaled that they were secure. A guardsman with his feet dangling out of the open side of a UH-60 Black Hawk waved to me as they passed overhead, so low that I could feel the warm wind from the rotor wash pushing down on me and threatening to send my hat aloft. I descended my hill and moved even closer to the staging area, leaping over a mud-filled drainage ditch and entering a grove of what appeared to be some variety of tall, invasive Jatropha shrubs, with leaves reminiscent of a papaya’s. I captured a few more frames as the helicopters rose into the air directly above me but soon the Black Hawks all disappeared and after fifteen minutes of scanning the skies for more I came to the conclusion that it was lunchtime.

A UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter approaches the sandbag staging area sending up a thick cloud of dust and sand.