The Tarball Chronicles. David Gessner
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perhaps to regional prejudice, I somehow accepted that it didn’t really matter much that these waters were home to over four thousand oil and natural gas wells. We needed somewhere to dump our industrial complex, but how can this place be that place: it shimmers with green.
Suddenly, a hundred feet below me, I see black and white wings and realize that we are soaring above a half-dozen Frigatebirds, officially known as magnificent Frigatebirds. While they are spectacular, spending whole days in the air, the adjective in the bird’s name has always seemed overdone to me, since they get their living in a somewhat seedy manner. They are kleptoparasitic, never deigning to stoop as low as to fish for themselves, but instead swooping down from on high to steal fish from other, more industrious birds. They seem to float far above the mess we have made, but of course they can’t stay above it for long. Eventually they must dip in and steal fish that are just as dirty as they were at the moment they left the water.
In the landscape below you can see geology at work, how the Mississippi dumped its nutrients for millions of years and how the land then spread southward from the delta, extending itself in miles and miles of watery grasslands, which in turn became home to young fish and oysters and shrimp and millions of birds. Far from a shit hole, it is a wonder. Green jigsaw pieces of grass fit with blue pieces of water while a river runs through this already-watery world. A great snaking river, hemmed in still, even at this point, funneled by engineers toward the Gulf itself. It is a shocking sight: the great freshwater torrent running home toward salt. It is still almost beyond sense. The bayou world of marsh grasses and creeks and straight man-made canals is one thing, but then through them, or looking like it is superimposed on top of them, is the great brown weaving Mississippi. I have never before seen freshwater of that magnitude moving through a coastal water ecosystem.
Before I came here I boned up on the Mississippi, and read a book called Rising Tide by John M. Barry. Barry’s book told the story of the great flood of 1927, but what really struck me was the frontispiece. If ever a picture was worth a thousand words here it was: an illustration of the branching tree of the Mississippi and all its tributaries. The picture was called “Mississippi River System.” Somehow I had never thought of it that way before. When I pictured our largest river I saw it running straight down, expressstyle, north to south from Minnesota to New Orleans. But this picture told a different story, a story that stretched from the headwaters of the Missouri River in Montana to those of the Allegheny in upstate New York. It made it look like every creek in the United States fed the Mississippi, which isn’t far off. The feeder streams and rivers were capillaries and veins and arteries, a great cardiovascular system of almost the entire country from east to west and north to south. And all of it ends up here.6
We fly on. I would have thought we were past any towns at this point, but suddenly a human outpost appears below us amidst the watery grasses. Through my headphones the pilot says that this hamlet, which sits at the mouth of the Mississippi, is called Pilottown. Here local river captains take over ships returning from sea to steer them up the Mississippi—the sea captains don’t know the river’s currents and tides like the local river captains do. The only way to get to this little outpost is by sea or air. According to our pilot it’s a wild place, renowned for its drinking and prostitution as much as its frontier remoteness.
After Pilottown, we reach the end of land. Orange and red and blue lines bubble out around the outer islands, as if a giant child had clumsily tried to trace the land’s outlines. These are the lines of boom, a colorful, if ineffective, protection against the oil. As of yesterday, 3,474 kilometers of boom have been laid down. And yet, with any sort of good wind or storm, the water and oil will splash right over the boom, rendering it useless.
As important as doing something is right now, looking like you are doing something is perhaps more important. This is a lesson BP has learned well. “False hustle,” was what Red Auerbach, the old Celtics coach, called it, and false hustle has become a BP specialty. Just this week the company had to sheepishly admit that they had doctored a photo from their spill command center in Houston that showed workers monitoring great banks of video screens glowing with underwater images. There it was in the papers: three passionate and concerned workers keeping their eyes on our waters. The only problem was that half of what they were seeing on the screens had been photoshopped into the image. Before this bit of trickery, most of the screens were blank.
I try to make out changes in the water’s color as we fly past the boom out into the Gulf, wondering what is oil and what is not. I see great black sheens and stretches of lighter water, but I have spent enough time on the coast to know how ocean colors can change, with or without oil. I don’t want to sound like an idiot, but I decide to ask Brian if I am seeing what I think I am seeing. He tells me that he can’t really see much oil at the moment, and the pilot agrees.
“You wouldn’t have believed it when we first came out,” he says. “You wouldn’t have been able to miss it then. It covered everything.”
I assume that by now much of it has been sunk to the ocean floor. When I look down my eyes can’t penetrate the surface, but just yesterday I read an interview with Samantha Joye, a scientist from the University of Georgia, who spoke of witnessing black plumes, many miles long, that travel deep under the water, large dead areas with no oxygen and no fish.7
After another fifteen minutes we reach the Deepwater Horizon rig itself. As we approach, the dozens of boats below look like Tonka toys gathered around the rig, as if trying to protect and comfort it. But as we get closer, it is clear the rig needs no comfort. It is emblazoned with BP’s green and sunny logo and appears almost cheery, as it is no doubt supposed to look. The scene looks not just sunny but industrious, with no hint of despair.
From up here the rig may look like a toy, but it is in fact a great metal island, capable of housing over a hundred men. In broad daylight it is hard to picture the fiery hell of April 20, the night when the methane bubble blew up through the well and exploded at the platform, killing eleven men, injuring seventeen more, and sending dozens leaping off the platform into the flaming water. What was it like to take that ten-story plunge? The chief engineer said later that he thought of his wife and his little girl before closing his eyes and making the leap. Those, I am sure, would have been exactly my thoughts.
In the story being told right now the Deepwater explosion was a great tragedy, but also something anomalous, an “accident,” of course, a terrible accident. But is something an accident if crucial tests are skipped, if costs are cut, if warning systems are turned off so alarms won’t ring, and if even the CEOs of Shell and Exxon—a Big Oil gang that is known to stick together—have sworn in front of Congress that the Deepwater Horizon well did not come close to meeting industry standards? Is something an accident if a multi-billion-dollar company, the world’s fourth largest, decides it needs even greater profits, and sends a topdown directive to cut costs company wide by 25 perecent? “I’m not a cement engineer,” BP’s CEO Tony Hayward told Congress in way of defense, but presumably he had a few cement engineers working for him. He also said, “I’d like my life back,” a sentiment no doubt shared by the eleven dead crew members and their families.
Far from anomalous, disasters had, by the time of the spill, become commonplace in the world of British Petroleum. Over the past decade the company went from the little brother of oil to one of the big guns, acquiring Amoco and Arco in the process. But during that heady rush the company’s M.O. was to take risks and cut costs, safety be damned. This is not overstatement. BP has led the Big Oil league in deaths and disaster. In 2005, fifteen people were killed and 170 injured when BP’s Texas City refinery blew up due to shoddy safety standards. In July of that same year BP’s flagship for deepwater drilling, the giant off-shore rig Thunder Horse—Thunder Horse!—was toppled, seemingly by Hurricane Dennis but in fact by faulty valves hastily installed. The next year BP hit the disaster trifecta when 20,000 gallons spilled from a rusty pipeline in Prudehoe Bay on the north slope of Alaska.8
Which brings us back to the question: if things happen regularly and for the same reasons, do they still qualify as accidents? Which leads