Gulf of Dispair
Two years after the oil spill, the fishermen of the deep south are still in deep trouble.
BYRON ENCALADE, PRESIDENT, LOUISIANA OYSTERMAN ASSOCIATION: This is the marina, the boats. Just sitting here, sitting here rusting away, rusting away.
At the marina in Pointe a La Hache, on the east side of the mighty Mississippi, the fleet is in decay, and the community is in despair.
BYRON ENCALADE: Oh, this is all a brand new chain; I bought right before the oil spill. All that’s gotta be replaced now.
Byron Encalade is President of the Louisiana Oysterman Association.
REPORTER: This should be out working, shouldn't it?
BYRON ENCALADE: Absolutely. Right now, this marina would be booming. I mean, you talking about boats from Texas, all the way to Mississippi, Alabama would be in here - it is heart-breaking. It almost makes you don’t wana come to the marina.
REPORTER: Byron, they say there are no oysters left here. What do you say to that?
BYRON ENCALADE: It is the facts. I mean, there is no little oysters growing, sprouting. So I…our future is very uncertain. I mean, there are no oysters.
In April 2010, the 'Deepwater Horizon' drilling rig exploded, with a loss of 11 lives.
PILOT IN HELICOPTER OVER RIG: Oh, shit. Look at this rig, wow!
Initially, BP played down the spill, describing the environmental impact as modest. But over three months, nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil spewed into the Gulf.
BYRON ENCALADE: We've got various captains aboard…
With their boats tied up, the fishermen are struggling.
FISHERMAN 1: It's been rough, man. Really, been rough. And we’re trying to hold on to these people, trying to pay us our money. Get ourselves on our feet, get our families straight.
FISHERMAN 2: Last couple of years, it’s been bad. Can’t work. There’s no oysters.
BYRON ENCALADE: This is a fishing community. This is what we do. If we're not fishing, there's nothing else to do. We don't have big industries down here. The community rises and falls on our estuaries being healthy.
BP ADVERTISEMENT: When BP made a commitment to the Gulf, we knew it would take time. But we were determined to see it through. Thousands of environmental samples from across the Gulf have been analysed by independent labs under the direction of the US Coastguard. I'm glad to report all beaches and waters are open! For everyone to enjoy.
BYRON ENCALADE: Everything is fine. The Gulf is recovering - that is what you hear from BP.
REPORTER: That is not true?
BYRON ENCALADE: No, it's not true! You see all the boats in the marina - look at them, take a look. Why aren't they working? We at ground zero here. If people were back to work, what are all these boats doing parked at the marina?
Crude oil was not all that polluted the Gulf, BP sprayed millions of litres of Corexit, a controversial dispersant, to break up the slick. Corexit 9527, used in the initial days of the spill, is regarded as an acute health hazard by the US environmental protection agency. In the 'Exxon Valdez' disaster in Alaska, the dispersant was linked to serious human health complaints.
GLENDA PERRYMAN, COMMUNITY WORKER: The people are sick here. Folks need to know how sick and serious this is. This is a serious matter.
The spill has kept community worker Glenda Perryman very busy. She is taking me to visit some of the clean-up workers now suffering from ill health.
REPORTER: What is the problem with them?
GLENDA PERRYMAN: They are having breathing problems, headaches. Breaking out in rashes, asthma. They cannot breathe.
In Lucedale, Mississippi, we meet former clean-up worker Don Street, who has just been given the results of a blood test.
DON STREET: I've got 75% of this chemical.
GLENDA PERRYMAN: It says he has benzene in his blood, he has alpha benzene.
Don is not yet sure what the results mean, but he does know that since he worked on the spill he's suffered mysterious symptoms.
DON STREET: I'm breaking out with a rash and stuff. I've got it all over my arm, right across here, on my legs.
Don was one of the army of workers drafted in by BP. Not long after he was laid off, the symptoms began.
DON STREET: I have headaches and I itch a lot. You just constantly itching, you scratch so much you start bleeding. You constantly scratch all through the night while you are sleeping. I don't know if I'm living or dying because I don't know what the chemical's gonna cause. And that's what I'm afraid of, really.
We head across town to meet another sick worker.
GLENDA PERRYMAN: Keep your head up. Keep in touch with us. Let us do the fighting for you.
ROBERT KEMP: Well, we sure appreciate it. Because a lot of us are just at a dead end, we don’t know where to turn to.
Robert Kemp cleaned the spill for six months.
ROBERT KEMP: My job was to get on the boat and take new boons out, and to pour the old boon up.
At $14 an hour, the money was welcome, though conditions were tough.
ROBERT KEMP: We had nowhere to sit on the boat. Had no room to put the boom on as you sit on the boom. That is how I caught it. I lay back on it. And it is going into an open pore, which will be there for the rest of my life.
His doctors have diagnosed Mercer disease, a potentially fatal infection which shows up as painful lumps under the skin. Robert says he was trained in the use of personal protective equipment, or PPE, but some days, he claims, the workers were told to keep the safety gear off.
ROBERT KEMP: They give you the training for the PPE, but when you get out there and say, "Where is the PPE", they look at you like, "You are trying to get fired? There is no such thing, go to work."
REPORTER: Have you received any compensation?
ROBERT KEMP: Not one dime.
REPORTER: Why not?
ROBERT KEMP: They deny me - they said the infection did not come from their polluted water.
REPORTER: Where does it leave you, Robert?
ROBERT KEMP: Majority of times, sitting here at home.
GLENDA PERRYMAN: They are going to pay for this. One way or the other, they will have to pay. They want to use millions of dollars to advertise and say, "Everything is fine". Everything is not fine. Everything is not fine! Everything is bad in Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama. Everything is bad. It is really bad. It is people dying.
WILMA SUBRA, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST: We are here at Fourchon Beach, at the bottom of Bayou Lafouche, right above the Gulf of Mexico.
I take a walk with environmental scientist Wilma Subra, and it’s not long before she spots what she is looking for.
WILMA SUBRA: We have a very large ball tar ball that's washed on shore, and this is again two years since the BP crude spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Still washing on shore.
The tar balls are formed by accumulations of crude oil mixed with dispersant. Inside, they are highly toxic, and full of potentially deadly bacteria.
REPORTER: So if somebody broke that up, they could get what? What would happen to them?
WILMA SUBRA: They would first get respiratory impact, skin rashes, headache, nausea, developing into long-term chronic impacts, decreased lung function, cardiovascular impacts.
REPORTER: So you don't want to open it up…
WILMA SUBRA: No, I don't.
But there could be a much wider threat to human health.
REPORTER: Have traces of oil got into the food chain?
WILMA SUBRA: Absolutely. We’ve sampled shrimps, crabs, oysters and fin fish as well as some mussels. We are finding the petroleum hydrocarbons and the polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons in these tissue samples. And we're finding it in larger quantities over a one-year period after the spill, so that it's bio-accumulating in particularly the oysters.
Researchers from Louisiana State University have discovered a significant increase in deformities and infections in Gulf sea life. Wilma is worried.
REPORTER: What do you see at the end of the tunnel?
WILMA SUBRA: I see very long-term damage to the environment and human health. And therefore, it's going to have an impact on generations to come.
DEAN BLANCHARD, SEAFOOD COMPANY OWNER: You couldn't stand right here back in the old days. So many machines running around here. Shrimp going. We used to fill 10, 12 tractor trailers a day over here.
In Louisiana, Dean Blanchard is the seafood king. But since the spill his empire has crumbled.
REPORTER: How long can you keep on going for Dean?
DEAN BLANCHARD: Not much longer. Not much longer.
His company supplied more than 10% of all of the shrimp consumed in the United States.
REPORTER: What is going through your mind now?
DEAN BLANCHARD: Oh, I just wish it would be working, so we could be making money, get everything back to normal again. Just wondering if I ever guna live long enough to see normal again, you know? You work all your life expecting things to happen a certain way. Then all of a sudden a company like BP comes and changes everything, you know?
It's BP's decision to use dispersants that really makes him angry. The chemicals remove the oil from the surface, by breaking it down and spreading it through the water column.
DEAN BLANCHARD: You hire a bunch of shrimpers to go there and look for the oil. They'd hear airport planes come in the middle of the night. And then the next morning they'd go back to the spot where the oil was and it was nothing but bubbles and soap. They'd spray enough chemicals that it would sink the oil. All BP wanted to do was hide it, you know, out of sight of mind. It don’t matter that it’s all sitting on the bottom of the ocean killing everything. I've thought about going to England and trying to kill some people from BP but that still won't bring back the fish and the shrimp.
BP ADVERTISEMENT: BP’s guna be here till the oil is gone and the people and businesses are back to normal. We've agreed to create a $20 million claims fund administered independently at no cost to taxpayers.
There's no doubt the spill has cost BP dearly. From its claims fund, the company has already dished out nearly $6 billion in compensation. On top of that, it's now finalised a new 7.5 billion dollar deal, to settle one of the biggest class actions in history. But critics say the claims process, so far, hasn't always been fair.
WILMA SUBRA: You have to have lived for 60 days within a half mile of the beach and in Louisiana, the only beach we have is where we're standing at Grand Isle. And then they limit it to only about six or seven health impacts where there's some 30 impacts associated with the crude, as well as some 30 impacts associated with the dispersant. So they slimmed it down to almost nothing. So the people most impacted won't even qualify. And the end game is if you don't qualify you have to sue to get damages. And these people can afford to sue.
Over a gumbo dinner, I meet Stuart Smith, a New Orleans lawyer. He’s representing over a thousand cases against BP.
STUART SMITH, LAWYER: After they capped the well, they started opening all the beaches and I was shocked because I knew there was still oil in the Gulf. So I called my expert and I said, "How are they opening all the beaches?" So they called the public health service in Mississippi that had just opened the beach and he asked the guy, "He said how y'all opening the beaches?" And the guy goes, "Well, we tested if." And he said, "What kind of tests did you run?" And he said, "The same tests we have always run, faecal coli form."
Stuart’s been litigating against the big oil companies for 25 years. He’s highly critical of BP’s handling of the crisis.
STUART SMITH: BP has not done the right thing and they're not doing the right thing. They remind me of George Bush with mission accomplished. They’re not even close to getting the environment cleaned up the way it should be and compensating these people.
REPORTER: Why not?
STUART SMITH: Because they don't want to spend the money. You know, I think a decision was made early on at the highest levels of the White House to do whatever they could possibly do to save British Petroleum. So once that decision was made, you can see the actions since then have flowed directly from that decision. President Obama pretending to swim in the Gulf of Mexico, making these statements that 70% of the oil is gone, and that everything is safe. It was simply a lie.
REPORTER: Is that as bad as it was two years ago?
DEAN BLANCHARD: It’s worse.
REPORTER: Why?
DEAN BLANCHARD: Because the oil has started to mess up the plankton and the stuff that the small shrimp and fish eat. It has gone up the food chain, you know. If you look at what happened in Alaska, it took five years before it really got real bad. So we're expecting the same thing to happen here, I don’t see why it’d be no different.
In 2010, I visited the scene of the 'Exxon Valdez' spill. Two decades on, I found the people there are still suffering. But 20 times the amount of oil spilled in Alaska ended up in the Gulf of Mexico. It may be many years before the real impact is felt here.
BYRON ENCALADE: This is not mother nature we are dealing with. It is a man-made disaster. BP needs to step up and do what they said - I am going to make you whole again, I take full responsibility for what has happened to these fishing communities. We want to see that happen. We are still waiting to see that happen.
YALDA HAKIM: David Brill on the Gulf's toxic legacy. We have asked BP to respond to the allegations made in the story. You can see the full reply on our website. You can find the films that BP has produced on the clean-up. Plus, David talks about his time filming in the Gulf.
Reporter/Camera
DAVID BRILL
Producer
GARRY MCNAB
Researcher
MELANIE MORRISON
Editors
MICAH MCGOWN
NICK O’BRIEN
Original Music Composed by VICKI HANSEN