An Alabama Public Radio news feature, which is part of APR effort to address the "news desert" along the state's Gulf coast. APR recruited and trained veteran print journalists in Mobile and Baldwin counties to join our news team to do radio stories from along the Gulf coast.
Today marks 10 years since the Gulf oil spill. Over the past four months, the APR news team has been following up on issues related to this disaster. That effort includes our reporters along the Alabama Gulf coast. We’ve outlined concerns about the ongoing impact the spill may be having on the health of coastal residents and the seafood industry. But, there’s another issue.
“We knew about Exxon, we knew about these other places where stuff like this had happened. We knew they lost fisheries,” said Casi Calloway, the executive director of Mobile Baykeeper, an environmental advocacy organization. “We didn’t know what could happen to coastal Alabama, and we still don’t know. We’re still learning, I think."
Calloway recalls walks along the beaches of Dauphin Island with her family. That includes shortly after the start of the BP oil spill in 2010. Back then, millions of gallons of oil were flowing out of the well every day. Ideas to control the damage ranged from caustic chemicals to setting the oil on fire. Long floating barriers called booms seemed like the main way to keep the layer of crude from floating to shore. Calloway said the problem was cleanup crews were missing vulnerable areas, such as marshes and wetlands.
“Very early on we saw them putting boom in the weirdest places imaginable, and then they had no boom up on some of the biggest hatcheries areas like Mon Louis Island,” she said. “They had nothing protecting Mon Louis Island until we started calling them and saying, ‘Hey, have you seen this big grassy spit here, without people?”
On the Alabama Gulf Coast, oil didn’t begin to wash up until Memorial Day weekend. But by then, news outlets were already broadcasting images from the southern coast of Louisiana of pelicans and sea turtles covered in oil. In the days following the Apr. 20 explosion, bird rescue centers were set up Buras, Louisiana, Gulfport, Mississippi, Theodore, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida.
“I was so glad to be in the Gulf, because I would have worried,” Michelle Bellizzi said.
She managed the center in Theodore for the California based group International Bird Rescue organization.
“Honestly, I would have worried and I would have felt powerless and I would have wanted to do something, and I wouldn’t have been able to do something,” she said.
Bellizzi has responded to oil spills around the globe, and arrived on the Gulf Coast on Apr. 24, four days after the spill.
“And I was so happy to be able to be there,” Bellizzi said. “And, see what was going on and do the best I could, and know that the job was getting done.”
The bird rescue center in Theodore had seven pools and around a dozen cages for the birds who were victims of the spill. The list ranged from pelicans, seagulls and more than 160 northern gannets, which were migrating through the area. Bellizzi said her rescue effort was complicated by the way the birds responded to the oil all over their feathers.
“They will stop everything else and try to fix their coat,” she said. “They’ll stop eating, they’ll stop drinking, and they’ll become so obsessed with trying to fix their coat that they’ll ignore predators and they can get picked off by predators.”
Even the remedy was tough for the birds to handle. The process included washing each bird with detergent for up to an hour and a half. The rinsing off process often took as long.
"Once we have removed all of that product, they do not understand that you are trying to help them and they are fighting the whole time and in mortal terror,” Bellizzi said. “They have to be in really good physical condition to withstand that.”
And those were the lucky ones. The non-profit Center for Biological Diversity Gulf-wide says as many as 82,000 Gulf coastal birds may have been harmed by the 2010 oil spill. Other wildlife was affected, as well. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says up to 20 percent of Kemp's Ridley sea turtles nearing adulthood died from oil exposure. The number of bottlenosed dolphins was cut by half. Judy Haner is with The Nature Conservancy in Alabama.
“It’s not just about I’m out there creating marsh for marsh sake, I’m out there creating marsh to help with fisheries, to help with shoreline protection, and coastal resilience for communities,” Haner said. “That, for me, is such the cool part of it.”
Haner is the marine and freshwater programs director for the Conservancy. Her organization is one of several restoration groups that received funds from the settlements, penalties, and fines against BP. More than $20 billion is going toward the environmental and economic restoration of the Gulf region. Haner said the money has gone to the construction of oyster reefs, marsh and wetland rehabilitation, and land acquisition.
“We now have more than 120 linear miles connected, from Bayou La Batre over around Grand Bay into Mississippi, protected lands that anybody anywhere can use for recreation, or going out and exploring, or just knowing it’s there to buffer them from a storm,” she said.
Haner said perhaps the most successful part of the post-oil spill recovery is the collaborations and partnerships that were created out of necessity following the disaster.
“The working mechanisms that we have in place now are things I don’t think any of us could have thought of at the time. But they’ve evolved as we’ve evolved through this process, and that is one of the most telling, and one of the things that I think will be most lasting, from the spill. That these organizations and these groups that are working together now are doing it better than they ever have,” Haner said.
Editor’s note—Mobile Baykeeper is an underwriter of Alabama Public Radio
