This Story Isn't Over
The disaster the media forgot.
Tar Balls are rolling onto beaches in the Gulf again, stirred up by Tropical Storm Lee. This is a messy fact for those who have bought into the national and corporate narrative and who have consigned the story to the past tense. According to that narrative, the spill ended a year ago, on September 19th, when BP's Macondo oil well was declared officially capped, sealed, "dead." For most people the story about the spill was, too. The end of the story, like the capping of the well, had begun almost two months before, when Carol Browner, special adviser to the President on energy and climate change, declared: "Three fourths of the oil is gone." That this was an obvious misstatement, and was at first cause for acute embarrassment for the government, didn't lead to the comment ever being corrected in public. Browner's contention had been based on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) report that showed, by way of pie chart, how much of the oil had been skimmed, burned, recovered, evaporated or dispersed. Again the fact that the report was immediately contradicted by many scientists didn't quite dampen the seemingly universal feeling that, after months of media scrutiny, it was time to move on.
In fact the final sealing of the well provided the Bush-on-the-aircraft-carrier-declaring-victory-thumbs-up moment. After a summer in which oiled pelicans had dominated the news, it was time to swing the great national klieg light elsewhere—to Tea Parties, tsunamis and tornadoes. According to the PEW Research Center, during the period from April 20 to July 28, 22% of all national news media coverage focused on the spill. On cable news that figure went up to 31%, with CNN focuses a whopping 42% of their coverage on the spill. During August these numbers fell dramatically and after September they dropped off a cliff. So: the media had gone away, but had the story? Or to put it another way, had a story that had demanded almost half of our national attention suddenly transformed into a story that demanded none of it?
During the summer of the spill, I roamed the shores of the Gulf, talking to fishermen and oystermen and anyone else who would join me for a beer or cup of coffee. I went to the Gulf exactly because I'd grown tired of sitting on the lap of the national media while they told me their story, and wanted to see the story for myself. What I found was a narrative more complicated than the action story—Will they cap the well? Will they fire the BP guy?—I had been watching on the national news. At a bar called The Bicycle Shop in Mobile, Alabama, I spoke with a construction foreman who was tired of seeing the pictures of oiled pelicans in the national media.
"All summer long the same damn picture of the same damn bird," he said. "I hope's that bird's living a good life somewhere in a cage with someone spoon-feeding him. He deserves it. After this summer he must be tuckered out."
He took a slug of scotch.
"The media over-reported it earlier this summer. On the other hand, they're underreporting it now...on the other hand...well, the whole thing is other hands."
After weeks in the Gulf I knew what he meant. In many ways the seeds of our turning away from the story were sown in our initial over-attention. After all, we all knew what to expect from a big oil spill since we had been taught our basic narrative by the Exxon Valdez. We expected black gooping oil and oil soaked birds, and early on that is what we got, and focused on, in the Gulf. But BP knew this too. In fact, the corporate takeaway from the Valdez experience was that appearances—and images—count. And so by dumping millions of gallons of the dispersants Corexit (still illegal in England by the way, though the company claims for "rocky shoreline application" only) into the Gulf waters, BP attempted to insure that the oil headed downward, toward the ocean floor, and not shoreward or pelican-ward. The long term consequences of this strategy are still uncertain, and as recently as a month ago scientists like Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia were reporting great oiled dead zones on the ocean floor, but the short term PR results were pure genius. The oil was gone! Out of sight, out of mind.
The combination of massive dispersant use, fewer obviously dead birds and animals, the capping of the well, and the government's apparent eagerness to help BP tell the story in the past tense, dovetailed nicely with our own short attention spans and eagerness for novelty. When anyone dared bring up the fact that there were still troubles in the Gulf you could almost see the country cringe. Please, we said, Haven't we covered that already?
Despite this, in late October of 2010 I returned to the Gulf to see things for myself. During the summer I had gotten to know Ryan Lambert, a Cajun fishing and hunting guide in the town of Buras, about an hour and a half south of New Orleans. In July Ryan took me out in his boat to show me the necrotic fringe of oil along the wetlands, and that fall I wanted to visit him, and his landscape, again.
After we shook hands in his lodge, Ryan told me he wanted to show me something. We walked out behind his house to massive fish scaling tables where two hundred pounds of shrimp was piled. The shrimping season had finally opened, despite the objections of many shrimpers themselves and the reports of tarballs coming up in the nets. A cry of "Ollie, Ollie, in-come-free" had gone up. Everyone back in the water. Now, while I watched, Ryan started flicking through them until he got to one that he held under my eyes. He pointed to the black gills.
"Something is wrong down here," he said. "Very wrong. Look at this shrimp...I don't know what that black is but it's not right. Yesterday we had 500 pounds of shrimp and I looked at the gills and I could see black inside every one of them. I called the authorities and they said, 'Well, yeah, that's black gill disease. It's a bacteria.' So okay, I'll buy that, a bacteria. So then I got a question for you. Why haven't I ever seen it before in thirty years of hunting and fishing here? I try to be open-minded about all this to make sure that I don't overstep. But things are not right. I know when things are right because I been here so long and I live outside. In all my time here I've seen only one fish kill. But since the spill I've seen nine with my own eyes. Nine massive fish kills. Fish suddenly thrown up dead on shore or floating on the water. Why? For thirty years it didn't happen, so why'd it happen this year? And the fish too. Usually in October, when the trout come in, you have ten to twelve boats out fishing which means you're catching a thousand fish a day. But that's not what we're seeing. I've seen only seven boats limit-out since July. Seven boats! Unheard of. Ought to be seven a day. I can understand why we don't have business because of the perception of the oil. But not to have fish."
When the media did occasionally check in with the Gulf story, they liked to ask the question "Where has all the oil gone?" It turned out that Ryan Lambert had an answer to that question too. In the two weeks before my visit they had picked up 36,000 gallons of oil just in Bay Jimmy, Ryan's prime fishing grounds, and 10,000 bags of tar balls.
Ryan's was a different sort of news than that I had been hearing on the national broadcasts. As the year stretched on, and the spill receded into the past, it became not just a minority voice but a practically unheard one. You had the sense that people in the media, as the foreman in the bar in Mobile suggested, were a little embarrassed by how they had overreacted at first and so now compensated by swinging the other way.
And so we heard little about scientists still finding dispersants in the seafood and toxic hydrocarbons in the shrimp. And with the relative effectiveness of the dispersants, the disaster became more subtle, less media friendly (fewer oiled pelicans), casting those who opposed the "It's over" narrative as, take your pick, conspiracy theorists or Erin Brockoviches.
"Everyone reacts when they see birds covered in oil," Bethany Kraft, the executive director of the Alabama Coastal Foundation, told me. "But only us crazies talk about dispersants."
Dr. Samantha Joye echoed this sentiment when I spoke to her just two weeks ago, after she had returned from studying the Gulf floor.
"I learned a lot this year," she said. "And one thing I learned is that if you try to go against the national story you are portrayed as a lefty kook."
Around the time we spoke, BP had issued its own report, saying that the Gulf and economy had fully recovered, and that there was no reason to expect any future losses.
Dr. Joye begged to differ, "We have consistently found oil on the ocean floor. We are still finding it. Fresh layers and a lack of macro-fauna. The story is going to be pretty clear when this comes out. Over a year later and the system has to recover from some very serious issues. The story is not over just because they say it is."
Perhaps. But is she right? Not about the oil, but about the story. Of course no one should be surprised that BP, having learned the crucial lesson about appearances, should put forth a rosy picture. But isn't it a tad surprising, in these skeptical times, that the rest of us, including a press corps that first descended on the Gulf like a not-so-small army, have accepted this picture?
"They bit on everything," Samantha Joye said to me. She means the media bit, and by extension the rest of us bit, on just the story that BP, and the government, hoped we would accept. Perhaps the accepted story is the true story and Joye and Ryan Lambert are indeed lefty kooks. But while the main stream narrative may be both clear and clearly accepted, it doesn't make those shrimp any less black or the ocean floor any less murky.
