Oil Spill in Louisiana

Hey there. Long time no see. It's been ages since I updated this blog but now it has become necessary to resurrect it. Unfortunately, it's not for a happy occasion - I'm here in Louisiana, following a massive and growing oil spill after an oil rig exploded 50 miles off shore on April 20th. It is estimated that 5,000 barrels of oil per day are pouring out of the seabed. The oil slick is growing at an alarming rate, surrounding the entire east side of the boot of Louisiana and nearing Mississippi's shores as well.

I arrived here on Saturday with Liz Skree, who is a program associate for the Louisiana work at the Environmental Defense Fund, and we have spent the past two days talking to fishermen, whose lives have been directly impacted by the oil spill. Right now, there's a 10 day moratorium on fishing in the Gulf. Instead of fishing, many of the fishermen are being trained to deploy booms to prevent the oil from reaching shore, and hazmat training in case the oil comes ashore and they are needed to clean up the area. Many of these people are tense and on edge, and many talk of how they had just recently recovered from the effects of Katrina, only to be faced with another catastrophe.

We met a Vietnamese woman at a dock, whose husband is a shrimp fisherman. She showed us a small album full of photos of wreckage. A wrecked house, a smashed boat, rubble, and pieces of wood. The photos showed what Katrina left behind of their house and their livelihood. I wasn't sure why she kept such photos in an album - perhaps to remind herself of what she survived. But on the day that we met her, it only seemed to amplify her pain of having to suffer through yet another disaster.