One year later: Spill still on minds in Gulf

ALONG THE GULF COAST — In the small brick church just across the road from the chocolate waters of Bayou Lafourche, the Rev. Joseph Anthony Pereira unbuttons his collar as the last parishioners pull out of the lot. Tonight, nearly a year after the BP oil spill began, he’s asked his congregation of shrimpers and oil industry workers to think about lessons learned when survival is in jeopardy.

But Pereira doubts that many from the 5 p.m. Mass are ready to take his Lenten message to heart.

“You speak about this to them because they forget what they went through,” says Pereira, who pastors at St. Joseph’s Church in Galliano, La., a community that ties its fortunes to the Gulf of Mexico. “Because BP has spoiled them, given them all this money, they’ve gone back to the old ways. They give them big bucks and they forget.”

A year after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 and triggering a four-month battle to contain and cap the gusher, the people who make their lives along the Gulf’s coastline face countless variations of the trade-off that troubles Pereira.

They are anxious to banish the spill to memory. But that is very different from being ready to forgive. They are proud to call themselves independent, yet unsettled to be relying on a company and government many distrust. They want nothing more than for their home places to go back to the way they used to be, and in some of the most visible ways, they have. As proof, they point to sand scoured to a dazzling white by cleanup crews.

But uncertainty lingers, and anger, too. What might be hidden under the waves? When, if ever, can people so tied to the water be made whole?

Fighting through crisis

At dawn, the sky south of New Orleans is fringed with violet and pockets of thick fog mix with the odor from Chevron’s Oronite fuel additives plant. But another 14 miles down Louisiana Highway 23, the sun breaks through, and Mark Brockhoeft climbs into a flat-bottomed boat painted camouflage, motoring into a marshland that is its own world.

A flock of mottled ducks erupts from the high grass. The fins of fat redfish slice the water like torpedoes. Brockhoeft, who sports a thick mustache and a Saints cap, has been plying this bayou as a fly fishing guide since 1993. But the familiar scene still kindles a smile.

“You can take it for granted,” he says. “We did. Until we were about to lose it.”

Before the spill was capped, thick slicks moved into Barataria Bay, connected to the bayou about 10 miles south. The oil was the last in a series of setbacks for Brockhoeft, who once worked on the water 250 days a year. But that was before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks prevented tourists from flying down to fish. Hurricane Katrina swamped this part of Plaquemines Parish, putting it off limits for weeks and taking the lodges that accommodate anglers out of commission. The area rebuilt, but the recession kept visitors away.

If oil made it to the marshes, Brockhoeft knew, it would be over. When BP flooded the region with money, Brockhoeft rented out a boat and crew to a cleanup contractor at $1,560 a day for 82 days. Meanwhile, he sent back customers’ deposits and talked with friends about moving.

“Where the hell are we going to go? We were born down here. We spent our lives down here. Our livelihood is here,” says Brockhoeft, who is 58 and worked for a mosquito control company before becoming a guide.

Crews kept the oil at bay long enough to keep these backwaters open to fishing and to cap the well. Now, when clients call to ask, Brockhoeft assures them that “it’s beautiful. Come on down.”

But the guide says he’ll be glad this year to get bookings for more than 130 days on the water. And, while he’s upbeat about the health of the estuary, he watches for signs the oil and chemicals used to disperse it might eventually filter into a world that sees fish and other wildlife migrate between bayou and Gulf.

“The way things are going now, I wouldn’t bank on the way things are going to be five years from now,” he says. “We might not even be here.”

Faith and finances

On the beach at Gulfport, Miss. the next morning, the air’s cool enough for a Windbreaker. But with two cups of hotel coffee for fortification, Susan Joseph is out on the sand in time for sunrise. She studies a morning devotion from Micah 6:8 (“O people, the Lord has told you what is good...”) on her smart phone.

Joseph, from Prosper, Texas, is here to see her first grandchild, born the day before. The visit brings her back to the area where she spent childhood summers, at her grandmother’s house a block from the beach. During the spill she worried that a place that held so many prized memories would be ruined.

“I have a strong faith in God and I’m just really thankful he spared this area because it really is coming back,” says Joseph, looking out the laughing gulls gathered at low tide.

The stories Melvin and Christy Barnes’ five daughters are hearing, though, are very different. In late 2004, the couple — she’s a former Allstate agent, he was a boiler operator — took most of the money out of their 401(k) plans and used it to buy a seafood restaurant and market in Bay St. Louis, Miss. They renamed it “Cuz’s,” inspired by a nickname Melvin applies to many of his friends and customers, as well as to himself.

The restaurant is set back a few miles from the coast, but Katrina put it under more than 20 feet of water. The Barneses rebuilt, raising the restaurant up to a second floor. Business was good enough that they employed 22 workers serving up gumbo and mahi-mahi, doing $4,000 in sales on weekend nights, they say.

The uncertainties facing the Barneses are very different from the ones occupying minds down the coast at The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport. Inside a white vinyl Quonset hut, workers huddle over tanks, tending to 50 sea turtles that were hooked accidentally in Mississippi Sound last spring and summer. Another 300 turtles washed up dead. In a normal year, the institute might take in two or three.

But after months of observation, the institute’s staff can only guess about possible connections between the strandings and spill, theorizing that the turtles swam in to escape the oil, or were chasing fish that were trying to escape. More questions are raised by the unexplained deaths of dozens of dolphins that have washed up on Gulf beaches since January.

“It’s a little tricky. You see changes. You make observations. But sometimes you don’t necessarily know what caused it,” said Megan Broadway, a research assistant at IMMS. “It’s really a long-term process. It’s not like next week you’ll have answers.”