Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In the empty hotel restaurant, I met with Jeremy Hansen and Bryan Markland, two well-
scrubbed Coast Guard officials working on the cleanup effort. “You've got all these local
cleanup contractors poised to jump,” Hansen said. “It's cutthroat.”
Markland told me that cleanup contractors often begin their work even without being
hired, confident that if they do the work, someone will have to pay for it. And so skimmer
boats materialize, hungry for oil, and lines of floating containment boom sprout to cordon
it off, and the cleanup's economics bloom.
It is discouraging, though, to reflect on how little even an effective cleanup can achieve.
“Most oil spills, if you get more than 15 percent of the oil recovered, you're doing good,”
Markland said. “We think we're up in the 30 percent range on this.” The rest of a spill, he
told me, simply evaporates or disperses to what he called an
unnoticeable sheen.
Which is
to say, most of the cleanup is actually done by nature—or isn't done at all.
Hansen was sitting back, his arms crossed. He looked a little mischievous.
“Did you see the Port Arthur slogan?” he asked.
I laughed. I
had
seen it, on the website of the Port Arthur Chamber of Commerce. It
might have been the most ill-advised civic motto of all time:
Port Arthur: Where Oil and Water Do Mix. Beautifully.
Hansen smiled and shook his head in disbelief. “It's a good thing they don't,” he said.
“Or it would be a lot harder to clean up.”
Then there was Rhonda, the grumpy pelican lady. She was in charge of rescuing and re-
habilitating birds oiled by the spill. A bustling woman in a salmon-colored shirt exploding
with pockets, she struck me as deeply unsentimental about her work, and she didn't hide
her annoyance that I was interested in it. Had I been naive to imagine that the bird savior
of record would share a little enthusiasm for bird saving? But Rhonda was no simple bird
lover. She was the director of Wildlife Response Services LLC—just one more contractor
providing post-spill services.
“What is it you want, exactly?” she asked.
Eventually she resigned herself to my presence, and soon we were standing in the corner
of a cavernous warehouse, staring at a pelican. Miraculously, only nine birds had been oiled
in the spill: a loon, a cormorant, a seagull, a spotted sandpiper, a black-crowned night her-
on, and four pelicans. With one exception, they had all been released back to the wild after
being cleaned, fed, and housed until they were back in fighting form. The lone holdover
was a brown pelican now living in a plywood pen with a sheet over it, in a temporary re-
habilitation center downtown.
