Black Death in Louisiana and The Gulf

Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster. This oil spill is a man made disaster. There’s a big difference. This whole issue has made me pig biting mad. As I watched the evening news last night I was appalled and sickened by the oil damage to the beautiful gulf coast. The videos of oil covered pelicans and baby turtles choking to death on oil made me physically ill. Simply ridiculous.

Now I don’t claim to be any kind of expert on ecology and I’m not a member of PETA. I am just one of millions who feel that searching for new forms of energy should be a priority, and the time for action in plugging this well and cleaning up the damage has long sense passed.

As of today, BP was still claiming to have “the best minds” working on the emergency. Seems to me the oil company and the government both are doing too little too late. The marshes may never be the same. The beaches will take a mighty long time to repair, and the wildlife are dying. And then there are the fishermen and oyster farmers whose livelihoods have been stone walled. Makes no sense. And now the oil has washed up on beaches of all the Gulf coast states.

Early on, the government estimated (based on satellite observations of the water's surface) that 210,000 gallons of oil were being released daily. Experts who analyzed it estimated that the amount of oil pouring into the gulf was many times the government's official estimate.

Now I know there are two sides to every story, at least. And I fully believe that we the public get only a minute percentage of the facts, both from BP and from the government. But even with the limited amount of information available it is really easy to see that this type of disaster could have easily been averted. And that is the fact that sickens me to no end.

“It’s pretty fucked up,” Billy Bob Thornton tells GRITZ.  “I’ll tell you what, that’s one of our greatest treaures, the Gulf Coast. Javing spent my life-a lot of it-down aroundthere, it’s just real sad to me. I don’t know what the answer is. But I think it is a lot worse than people are letting on. It could be a catastrophe in the end. When you look at all the people that are out of work now because of it, it’s just inbeliuevable. But I’ll yell you what, those sons of bitches need to pay for all that. I know that much,”

“I am disgusted, to be honest with you about it,” Charlie Daniels tells GRITZ.  “Instead of doing something about it, the government has been more in the way more than anything else. I have seen so m,any people who have good ideas. If you can’t stop the leak at least keep the oil from getting on the shore. We’re over two months into this thing and all the government seems to be able to do is have meetings about it. That’s gonna do no good. Bureaucracy can not solve this. It takes people with some knowledge, with some common sense. There are people with ideas on how to clean this mess up but they are not allowed to. So you sit there and let the prime seafood breeding area of the entire coast be destroyed. You let the beaches that people make their livings on be destroyed. You shut down the drilling so you take away the last vestige of economic help that the people of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast have, and you leave them stranded and broke without jobs, without hope, without anything. I am disgusted.”

“I’ve got so many friends from the area - I just don’t understand it,” says J.D. Andrew of The Boxmasters.  “I understand things break, you know. But to be that greedy, ‘We’re just gonna pay off these guys that are supposed to check up on us. I understand backing up your friends, but these guiys do not have good intentions. They’re just trying to make money. It just makes me angry.  You know, just put some thought into what might happen if something breaks. And if somebody else has an idea on how to fix it, listen to them.”

There’s no doubt the oil spill has surpassed crisis stage, and we at GRITZ just hope the people with the power to stop the oil and clean it up will do anything and everything in their power to stop the madness.

Keep it Real. Keep it Southern - Buffalo







 

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