This entry is the seventh 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 & please help to share this link with others. You can read all of the current entries here: http://itsjustlight.com/?cat=105
It should be noted that this entry is VERY heavy on photo content (and is very long in general). It may take up to a few minutes for all of the images to load if you aren’t using a high-speed internet connection. You can access a larger version of each image in every entry by clicking on the photo; a new window or tab will open with the larger image, which I highly recommend to see the most detail.
The road north from Venice was nearly deserted. The few vehicles that passed me in the opposite direction were mostly police cars and military vehicles hauling sandbags. As I drove north, back toward New Orleans, I couldn’t help but feel angry on the behalf of all the people living in and around the bayous who have made their living from the sea for generations. Not only have they had their lives turned upside down and been forced to watch their would-be income floating ashore belly-up, but to add insult to injury their only hope for income now is to work for the very company that ruined their lives.
After hearing the other journalists in Venice telling horror stories about being denied access to the beaches in Grand Isle, I wanted to try my own luck. I made up my mind to continue driving through the evening to Grand Isle, not knowing what I would find there. I had seen photographs of dolphins on the beach there in May and all accounts seemed to indicate that the situation there was dire. It was nearing 11pm by the time I arrived in Port Fourchon, Louisiana’s southernmost port, located in Lafourche Parish. The port is one of the major hubs of the oil industry, with over 600 offshore oil platforms within 40 miles, providing nearly twenty percent of America’s oil supply. This is oil country as much as it is fishing country, and as I drove past the glittering lights of the port, parking lots filled with rig workers and service personnel, it was easy to see why tensions are running high here. I drove as far as I could towards Fourchon Beach, but as I was expecting, the road was blocked by law enforcement vehicles, their blue lights lighting up the night sky.
I was exhausted, and as midnight drew closer I knew I needed to find a place to sleep. The hotels near Port Fourchon and Grand Isle were all filled with BP contractors and government employees. There was absolutely no chance that I was going to drive around in the middle of the night looking for a motel back on the mainland, so it looked like I was going to spend a night in my car. I’m not at all opposed to sleeping in cars, it’s really not much worse than half of the hotel rooms I’ve stayed in. I drove around for a bit looking for a good overnight parking spot; I wanted somewhere that was private enough that I wouldn’t find the state police banging on my window in the middle of the night, but public enough that I wouldn’t find myself totally isolated if something were to go bump in the night. I found a perfect spot right next to the water in front of an empty dock illuminated by the orange glow of a streetlight, in a quiet but populated area near Port Fourchon Marina. The real downside to vehicular accommodations in Louisiana is the heat and humidity. The humidity is inescapable, but a steady, cool breeze was blowing in from the Gulf and across the bayou, seemingly solving the heat issue. I opened the sun-roof, rolled down the windows, reclined my seat and swung my legs up and onto the passenger side dashboard. With a towel rolled up behind my head as a pillow I was pretty comfortable. Within minutes, the cool breeze had filled the car with swarming mosquitoes, not only biting me but also buzzing loudly in my ears. At a certain point once you’ve been bitten by enough of these horrible little insects, your skin starts to feel a bit numb and the individual bites no longer bother you as much. The buzzing, however, never gets less annoying. I was forced to roll the windows up and soon I could feel the sweat trickling slowly down my neck. Slumber finally came though, and I managed to sleep until 6:30am.
With the early-morning sun already beginning to turn my car into an oven, I quickly brushed my teeth with the water from my metal bottle, and with at least my mouth feeling a bit more refreshed I set off in the car towards Grand Isle, just a few miles away. The town was quiet, but the signs along the road loudly proclaimed what the locals thought of BP. “BP. Cannot fish or swim. How the hell are we suppose to feed our kids now?” read one sign. A toilet sat in someone’s front yard, with a placard above it designating it “BP Headquarters.” I pulled into the parking area for one of the beach entrances. It was nearly 8am now, but the beach was still deserted. I could see a few small figures in the distance, but there was no one on the beach for thousands of feet in either direction. The oil was not terrible in this particular spot I had chosen to explore. Small clumps of crude dotted the sand, much like what I had seen in parts of Florida and Alabama.
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