My Birthday With BP

Photo by Cylvia Hayes

Tuesday was my 43^rd birthday. It started at 4:30am (personally, I am no fan of early mornings). I stumbled into the little community kitchen looking for coffee. A bleary-eyed project leader, Mike R., showed up 30 seconds later. “Why are you up so early?” he asked.

“Because you said my crew had to leave at 5am,” I responded, confused and groggy.

“Oh, sorry about that. You were reassigned late last night after you were already in bed.” One split second of irritation was swept away by pure relief. The next 90 minutes of sleep were sweet indeed.

That evening at dinner, to my great surprise, the PDX 2 Gulf Coast team arranged a little celebration.  Stiv led in singing “Happy Birthday” and Mike R presented me with a wonderful, colorful card that Shannon, our cartoonist, had designed and all the team had signed. The card was accompanied by a T-shirt purchased from Syd’s Bate and Tackle, Leeville LA. The entire backside of the shirt is covered with the naked backside of a very well built man with a flexed fishing rod attached to a leaping tarpon fish. It reads, “Fish Naked!” which made me laugh.

I was really touched that a group of people I had only known for three days would go to such lengths and come up with such perfect gifts on the fly.

But alas, a short walk across the street took the edge off my light spirits and brought back the reality of the situation and the reason for our mission.

With the sun setting I walked into Site 7.

Photo by Cylvia Hayes

Site 7 is the current location of the huge oil washing machine that BP has deployed in Grand Isle. It is an impressive array of machinery. The center piece is an imposing rectangular apparatus, approximately 100 ft long and 20 feet tall. Front end loaders dump large loads of oiled sand into a gaping hopper on one end. The sand is put through a filter and then carried via conveyer belt through a hot water wash, eventually to be spit onto the beach again.

The entire scene was abuzz with equipment: semi-trucks, diesel trucks, generators on trailers, banks of overhead lights, a track hoe, a tall crane. Huge piles of sand stood in long lines waiting to be fed to the machine.

The amount of fossil fuel consumed to clean fossil fuel from the beach is staggering. I just had to shake my head in sad wonder.

A BP worker, wearing a white hard hat with a green BP logo and the name “Luther” printed on it, greeted us at the orange plastic barrier fencing beyond which unauthorized personnel were not allowed to go.

He was surprisingly talkative compared to other BP personnel I had already encountered on this trip. He explained the sand cleaning process and gave us his opinion on a number of things. First, he told us that the sand came out cleaner than before the spill and that the residents were “amazed” at how good it looked. He told us about natural oil seepage and how that fouled beaches even in California. “We could meet America’s oil needs if we could figure out how to collect natural seepage.”

He said he had, “seen a lot of spills all over the world” and that he thought the only thing that would suffer any lengthy impacts from the Deep Water Horizon spill would be the oyster fishery.  All of this was delivered with a confident, friendly posture as if it were just common sense.

I wondered to myself if he ever questioned whether it might not be a positive thing to have seen oil spills all over the world. I was pretty certain the question would bounce right off the well-oiled BP veneer and decided, for the moment, not to ask.

As I started to leave, I saw a bright star in the darkened sky.  I made a wish – a birthday wish upon a star. My wish was that our nation and our species would choose a course that made scenes like the one before me a thing of the past.

By Cylvia Hayes