As I Drive down along the Mississippi River out of New Orleans and heading to the gulf, my windshield wipers kept almost perfect cadence with the Cajun ballad playing on the radio. Doug Kershaw is singing “Louisiana Man”, the lyrics describing a childhood growing up in the swamps and marshes of Southern Louisiana. The rain continued hard and steady as I pulled up to the Riverside Restaurant in Venice. The eatery serves mainly seafood; its owners – Acy and Marla Cooper - are shrimpers as well, supplying some of the very food served there. The interior is dark, with table-clothed picnic tables inside empty of customers. On one of the walls hangs a framed 2007 newspaper article celebrating Riverside’s reopening after the storm devastation of both Katrina and Rita in 2005. Almost nothing was left of the restaurant except its cinderblock shell and a beautiful hand-painted mural of the local marsh that graces the main wall. In the article, Acy Cooper recounts how the survival of his trawler and the abundance of shrimp after the storm allowed him to rebuild. Now a new storm threatens the most fundamental underpinning of his business.
There are similar stories all along this stretch of Route 23 – stories of people who struggled to rebuild their livelihoods and culture with little help from a largely ineffectual federal government. The parallels to hurricane Katrina are as remarkable as they are disquieting. Almost five years ago, the world saw satellite images of a huge cyclone steadily moving in for a direct hit to this very region, and there was nothing anyone could do but watch and pray. Precise landfall was uncertain until it became inevitable. And after the monster spent its fury and burnt itself out over the eastern states, most of Louisiana found itself picking up the pieces of its shattered existence, alone. While the storm that dances off the coast today shows none of the white fury of a hurricane, its toxic tendrils move quietly with equal uncertainty, promising death to the very foundation of the gulf ecosystem. Like any ecological pyramid, the top consumer ceases to exist when the bottom falls out. In this case the top consumer is human, and when the bottom falls out the result may be nothing less than the collapse of an entire regional culture.
The threat is everywhere. Local radio station talk shows which as recently as Mardi Gras were still talking about the world-champion Saints are now full of banter about the oil spill. Marinas and parks have been transformed into operational bases for the various teams involved – Plaquemines Parish’s Inland Waterways Strike Force, the Coast Guard’s Mobile Incident Command Post, the EPA’s Emergency Response Team, and the Sheriff’s Disaster Response Team. Men and women wearing Coast Guard uniforms are everywhere. Freshly-packed containment booms and sorbents are neatly piled on the lawns of the marinas. Long rows of porta-johnnies lined up like soldiers attest to the influx of people here to fight the spill. Hastily-constructed signs advertising legal services for those who suffered injury or loss from the BP/Transocean oil spill line the highway.
My mission here is to assist in any way I can. I am a veterinarian by profession, and Louisiana has been almost like a second home to me. And so I bring my enthusiasm, my motivation, my love of the region and my skills to make whatever dent I can against the seeming endless onslaught of oil that is occurring here. I have registered with the Gulf Response Involvement Team, the US Fish and Wildlife Services, have taken online testing for HAZCOM certification, and have directly contacted both TriState Bird Rescue (contracted by BP to handle wildlife impact from the spill) and the Plaquemines Parish government. I have alerted them that I was travelling down from Pennsylvania, ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work. The only one to take me up on my offer was an email from the Gulf Response Involvement Team asking me to volunteer picking up trash on a beach near the Texas border - far from the spill and seemly not even in the trajectory. So I travelled to Venice, and by sheer luck found the bird rescue facility. I was only allowed to enter a few feet into the building (and that small advantage was likely due to the rain), where it was explained to me that there were a number of bureaucratic hurdles just to get myself placed on the list of wildlife rescue volunteers. The irony is that bureaucracies move slowly and stubbornly, while the slick travels miles every day, unencumbered and free. And while life blood of this area is progressively choked off hour by hour, the enthusiasm and spirit of eager volunteers like me is redirected to swimming in a slick of administrative obstacles.
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