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Vice Blog

LOUISIANA GODDAMN - PART 1

As someone's hopefully told you, for the last month and a half a 2-foot-wide pipe in the Gulf of Mexico has been cumming oil to the tune of half a million gallons a day. Now that someone else has finally published sad pictures of a single sad pelican covered in goo, the kind of people who are more torn up over animals they know nothing about than 11 men dying and hundreds of thousands more losing their livelihoods have joined us on the same page re: this situation being extremely fucked. We went down to Louisiana over Memorial Day to see some of the damage for ourselves. Because we are Renegades of Journalism®, we decided not to go where the oil

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was

but where it wasn't. Or rather where it will be. Actually we'd planned to start out on Grand Isle, where the tar's been lapping up on the beach since April, but Obama and his pack of

fake cleanup workers

beat us to it. We tried to make friends with some bigshot producers from CBS to see if they'd help us squeeze in with the press circus only to be cold-shouldered with a "Sorry, we're not

in

the media, we

use

the media." (Even just typing that makes me shake with rage.) After keying their van, we headed to a bar to nurse our egos where a fellow drinker offered us the consolation that the real shit wasn't happening on telegenic Grand Isle, but over in the marshlands that constitute the vast majority of the state's coast: "They keep bragging about how Louisiana's only got two beaches closed, but they leave out the part where we only had two beaches to begin with." With that in mind we put our daiquiris in to-go cups and set course for the bayou.

Point-aux-Chenes is a tiny finger of cajun land separated from the Gulf by about ten miles of marsh. This distance used to be a lot greater and more lushly foliated, but in the 50s and 60s the oil industry cut canals through the swamp for new pipelines which allowed greater and greater amounts of seawater to spill in and eat away at the land. Now instead of dense live-oak canopies shielding entire herds of deer and bog-cattle over acres of solid ground, you've got a couple wild horses hanging out under a skeleton tree on a strip of grass you could chuck an apple over. Gother for sure, but sadly, unsustainably so. At the Point-aux-Chenes marina we hooked up with a mellower Louisianan version of Dog the bounty hunter named Mike, who took us out to the start of open waters, where the marsh grass glistened weirdly in the sun.

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"That's the sheen from the oil." He pulled the boat up into the grass so we could see the thin brown film which was causing the glare. I ran my finger up one of the blades and came away with a smudge of horrible-smelling shit that took nearly half an hour of continuous scrubbing with some weird marine solvent to get off my skin.

When we got back to the docks there was a short debate over whether or not the oil stinking up my finger was from the BP spill or just a faulty boat motor. But even the most stalwart proponent of the motor theory conceded Mike's larger point: "So far the winds have kept the major part of the slick from coming into this area, but if we get one bad storm surge it's going to sweep right across everything you can see."

This turned out to be the last day of open fishing in the area. The next morning boats from the State Fisheries and Wildlife department came tear-assing up the canal and made everyone who'd already caught fish dump their coolers into the marina. As the marina emptied out on what should have been one of the busiest days of the year and its owner began a corresponding freak out, we tried to determine what had set off the lockdown. By everyone's accounts the oil was still miles out. Mike claimed he'd been hearing small-engine planes flying over the area at night which he believed were dumping dispersal agents at the mouth of the bayou. Supposedly when

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Corexit and similar chemicals

come into an estuary they produce little bubbly patches that look like seafoam, only rust brown and terrible smelling, which we'd seen on our boat ride.

You'd think that "Hey, why's it suddenly dangerous for me to eat this redfish, eh?" would elicit a fairly quick and straightforward reply, but the Fish & Wildlife men at the docks couldn't even tell us if the waters had tested positive for something (anything) or if this was all simply precautionary matter. In fact they really couldn't tell us much of anything besides "Ask our field office," who told us "Ask the main office in Baton Rouge," who all had their phones off for the weekend. Nice one. We then called the local airport to see if they knew anything about Mike's night flights, but their tower shuts down at 7 and pilots flying thereafter aren't required to file a flight plan. Double nice one. Our 'noia sufficiently tickled, we finally decided to check in with the local BP goons. BABY BALLS

Continued in a few…