Forcerealist - Oil Spill

Over the 4th of July weekend our family traveled down to the Gulf. We entered the town of Waveland, LA. This was the unfortunate home of where the eye of Katrina broke land onto the Continental United States.

We were there to see the impact of hurricane Katrina and now a second disaster that has hit the coast caused by the recent BP oil spill.

"This was a busy town with businesses and structures that jetted out over the water. Now there are just stubs of wood sticking up from the ground where the businesses and houses stood." Our son Mike Page Jr told us as he drove us through. "Anything standing is pretty much newly built, not much survived the eye."

As I looked out at the beach I imagined dozens of families out enjoying their day before Katrina hit. But today on this beautiful sunny day I saw only two families playing in between water and sand which gave me an eerie feeling that one would get if they had entered a ghost town. You could tell the economic impact that Katrina had on this town.

While I was walking the beach I found no sign of any tarballs. The water was brown and muddy looking unlike the clear beaches found in Florida further down the coast, but the marine life was vibrant. Pelicans diving into the water for a tasty catch, seagulls flying overhead all seemed normal there.

In the background we saw dozens of men dressed in bright lime green vests driving 4 wheel vehicles scavenging the beach for tarballs produced from the BP spill.

I stopped one of these gentlemen to inquire about the tar balls.

"Have you been finding any tarballs here? I have been walking on the beach and I have not seen one tar ball."

"Yes Mame, we have been collecting them. They are about this size,..." the man held up his fingers to make the international OK sign "and they are shinny. At first, only a few came up on shore but now they are moving in on a more consistent basis. We have the beach pretty well cleaned up at this moment though. We have been working hard at it all morning."

"Does the water look this muddy all of the time or does it look different since the BP spill?" I asked.

"Our water here is muddy all of the time" he paused and looked out over the water "It looks pretty much the same as it always has."

The gentleman went on to stress that the tar balls were very dangerous and advised us not to touch them. He also asked to to warn anyone that might be around one to take caution and leave it alone.

The story was quite different down the coastline in Pensacola FL. I compared my story with a friend who traveled to that part of the coastline for her 4th of July weekend.

There were men out there driving carts and getting paid 15 dollars an hour to scan the beach for tar balls. We saw plenty of tar balls, most the size of a pea or slightly bigger. We kept stepping in them as we walked up and down the beach. But despite the situation there were a healthy number of people enjoying the beach some were even swimming and carrying on as normal."

"We did not see any oil on the water but the authorities were giving out daily reports according to the tide."

"While we did see tar balls, from where we were standing on the coast it did not look as bad as what we have been hearing on the TV, but that is only from where we were on the beach."

We have seen many legitimate reports on the television where birds have been covered in oil which has been a sad sight but the good news is that not all areas have been hit as dramatically.

Hopefully Man and Nature will work together to clean this spill up. Unfortunately some of the chemicals used to break down the oil may remain the the water for decades. We hope and pray that man finds much safer methods of his explorations upon our planet and learn to be more mindful of his consequences and put measures in place so things like this no longer happen.