Jacoba Charles's articles

GULFPORT, MS. -- Mike Hirshfield, the chief scientist aboard the ship Oceana Latitude, is a lean, white-bearded man with keen brown eyes. Currently, those eyes are trained on the Gulf of Mexico as he and a crew of 12 scientists conduct independent research on the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

“We’ve never had a circumstance where so much oil has come up from so deep,” he said during the launching party for the boat’s research mission to the gulf. “Nobody knows what we are going to find.”

During their mission, the Oceana crew is sampling and mapping subsurface oil, as well as using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to explore seafloor habitat areas as much as 3,200 feet below the surface that may have been harmed by underwater oil.

The Oceana crew isn’t the only one conducting independent research into the effects of the spill. Myriad academics, environmentalists and grassroots activists have been collecting data from water samples to video footage. And the environmental organization Greenpeace also has sent their 165-foot-long icebreaker, the Arctic Sunrise, on a three-month expedition to the area.

“Nobody is going to find it all out,” Hirshfield said. “All of us are trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle, and we’re happy to contribute any piece we can.”

Many, from activists to fishermen, welcome independent research and are openly skeptical of official reports from both BP and the government.

BAYOU LA BATRE, AL. -- Cua Huynh sits on the living room floor of her trailer and cries. The 72-year-old Vietnamese woman relied on income from shucking oysters at a nearby seafood processor, but she has been unemployed for nearly four months since the Gulf oil spill shut down the industry.

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” Huynh says through a translator. “Without the oysters, it is going to be hard.”

Checks for $300 a month from the BP claims office haven’t been enough to make ends meet, so Huynh has been visiting the local food bank, walking the streets to collect aluminum cans, and selling the chickens that she raises in her back yard.

Part of the reason she is crying, she says, is from gratitude – friends and neighbors bring her food, and sometimes local stores will buy pumpkins from the sprawling vine in front of her house.

While all people who rely on the region’s seafood industry are suffering as a result of the oil spill, the Vietnamese community faces additional challenges because of the language barrier.

“A lot of information doesn’t get communicated because a lot of service providers only speak English,” says John Nguyen, a coordinator with the Vietnamese American Young Leadership Association (VAYLA) of New Orleans. “There are some interpreters but they are trying to get the information out to a population of about 40,000.”

NEW ORLEANS, LA. -- Executive Director of the Center for Biological Diversity, Kieran Suckling, is on his cell phone as he steers a rental car through downtown New Orleans. Beside him, the Center’s assistant director Sarah Bergman gives directions while working on a laptop and sending email from her cell.

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, the controversial environmental organization has filed seven lawsuits worth $19 billion against BP and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. Yet this is the first trip its busy directors have made to the place that they have been fighting to protect.

On the second day of Suckling and Bergman’s whirlwind tour of Louisiana, the White House Council on Environmental Quality released a long-awaited report which recommended ending the use of "categorical exclusions" to approve oil drilling in the gulf. Between that news, and an unrelated controversy involving off-road vehicle use in California, Suckling’s phone is even busier than usual as reporters call him for his reliably colorful quotes, and staff call to craft press releases.

GULF SHORES, AL. -- Every morning, Peggy Lively is up before dawn to survey the beach in front of her condominium for the nesting tracks of endangered sea turtles. The petite, red-haired grandmother has been an active force with the volunteer patrol, Share the Beach, for nine years.

“The turtles have done much more for me than I’ve ever done for them,” says Lively, who invests over 300 hours each summer into the turtles and related restoration projects. “Other than my family, this beach is my next priority.”

Even in ordinary years, it takes a lot of work to try to protect Alabama’s three species of endangered sea turtles from the hazards of encroaching development. But this year, the group’s job has become even more challenging.

As oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster drifted toward the beaches where female turtles lay their eggs, conservationists worried about the fate of the future hatchlings.

An elaborate plan was developed to dig up every egg from every nest on the gulf coast between Mississippi and Florida, and release the hatchlings into the clean waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

BAYOU LA BATRE, AL.—Workers move nimbly across the frames of two half-finished steel boats at Rodriguez Boat Builders on the muddy shores of Bayou Coden. Sparks fly as a welder works beneath one starboard propeller; thirty feet over his head, a newly finished captain's quarters smells of sawdust and varnish.

But at this time last year, the company had 120 employees instead of 16, and the shipyard typically had at least three more boats under construction.

"We always had a backlog, more work than we could do at one time," owner Joseph Rodriguez says, gesturing at the two boats. "But now, this is it."

The economic recession had already put the brakes on business in the shipbuilding town of Bayou La Batre. But the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the subsequent deepwater drilling moratorium have made the future look even more grim.

"Everybody is sitting around going, 'What the hell is going to happen now,'" says Tara Marshall, vice president of Steiner Shipyard. "I think with the oil moratorium, it could kill our whole economy down here."

HOPEDALE, LA.— In the small towns of coastal Louisiana, the widespread consensus is that the oil is far from gone.

Fishermen return from working on cleanup crews or from recreational angling trips with stories of crabs whose lungs are black with oil, or of oysters with shells covered in sludge. They take photos and carry tarballs home like talismans to show what they have seen. They talk about their fears with anyone who will listen, and often their voices are tinged with panic.

Yet a government report released last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that 75 percent of the oil has been cleaned up, dispersed or otherwise contained. And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that of all the samples of seafood that have been tested since the oil spill, none have shown evidence of contamination.

While some in the coastal seafood industry agree with these assessments, a majority seem to view the news with a sense of betrayal.

"The cleanup isn't even close to being done," said Karen Hopkins of Dean Blanchard Seafood, which accounts for about 11 percent of the U.S. shrimp supply, on the barrier island of Grand Isle.

GOLDEN MEADOWS, LA—The twisted silhouettes of leafless trees dot the marsh around the homeland of southern Louisiana's Houma tribe. Telephone poles list sideways in the water that laps at the edges of many roads.

It wasn't always this way. These changes to the landscape serve as stark symbols of the myriad social and environmental problems facing the tribe. Coastal erosion is rapidly gnawing away solid ground, while saltwater intrusion has killed vast numbers of oaks over the last forty years. And those are just a few of the problems faced by the tribe.

But the Bayou Healers, a tribal youth group that was conceived in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, plans to fight those challenges.

"We realized that it was important to have an organization that can bring awareness of what is happening here to outsiders, as well as to preserve our culture," said Jason Pitre, 25, who founded the organization along with 21-year-old Dana Solet.

HOUMA, LA.--- A mucky pile of oysters rattles onto a metal table as captain Jesus Zarraga guides his trawler in lazy loops on the backwaters of Lake Mechant. While his four-man crew quickly sifts through the shells, a basket-like dredge is trailing in the dark water beneath the boat, scooping up a fresh load of the tasty mollusks.

Zarraga has been harvesting oysters for more than a quarter of a century. He didn’t like the work when he first arrived from Mexico, he says, looking out at the grassy bayou while sweat rolls down his face. But now he loves it, and considers southern Louisiana his home.

Yet this summer two of Zarraga’s three boats sit idle, sidelined by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. His story is one small piece of a compounding crisis faced by the oyster industry in the Gulf of Mexico, which supplies over 70 percent of all oysters harvested in the United States. Half of that amount comes from the state of Louisiana alone. 

Over 1.3 million acres of public and privately leased water bottoms have been closed to oyster fishing due to the spill. While other fisheries have begun to be re-opened, oystering will likely be the last to get a green light – in part because the shellfish can’t move away from encroaching oil, and in part because they feed by filtering particles out of the water and into their flesh.

GRAND ISLE, LA. -- Leanne Sarco knelt on the sand, up to her elbow in oil. The blond park ranger was showing a group of visitors the remnants of the spill still left on the Grand Isle State Park Beach, where she has been running the Hermit Crab Survival Project for the last eight weeks. Amid the scattered tarballs and swathes of darkened sand were fresher, jelly-like globs.

It was at one of these that Sarco stopped and scooped up a handful of oil. And then another, and another. Beneath that single palm-sized glob was a pocket of crude that was several feet deep.

“It just keeps coming – and it’s all along the shore,” Sarco said. “You wouldn’t want your kids to build a sand castle out of this."