Whenever I post updates on the recovery efforts related to Katrina and the failed Levees, or the BP disaster, I receive and delete comments that are rude, disbelieving (or both) and others that are downright stupid. Some say, "look, it's over, everything is back to normal, get over it, you're beating a dead horse" and worse. While I will not give the mouth-breathing stoopid a platform on this blog, I will post updates that few in the USA seem willing to read or take seriously, but I will tell you that the hits I get from Asia, Australia, and South America arrive via a query using pretty much the same search phrases. I can only assume the rest of the world is interested (maybe just curious) in these forgotten stories. Anyway, here it is, from HuffPo:
Down in the Louisiana bayou, the fall season is changing with the north winds. Millions of ducks, geese and migratory birds are arriving as they have throughout the millennia. Shrimp are slowly abandoning the nourishing coastal marshes as cooler water pushes them out to sea.The entire piece is a bit long, but informative. HERE.
On the surface, life appears normal. But all is far from normal more than six months after the worst maritime oil spill in history. Many residents here are in a fight for their lives. Things have not changed much for them since that fateful day on April 20 when the Deepwater Horizon blew a fireball of oil and gas into the air, killing 11 men and creating an 87-day gusher of undersea oil that captured the world's attention.
Now the press is gone and the world has moved on. But fishermen and businesses in the Gulf are struggling. Demand for once-prized Gulf shrimp and crab is as low as a brown pelican skimming the sea searching for its next meal. The American public isn't buying the PR campaigns or government claims that the seafood is safe. Fishermen are having a hard time paying their bills after the most disastrous season since Katrina.
Meanwhile, the clean-up work continues at a slower pace. Many locals are being laid off from work, sometimes replaced by cheaper, out of area contractors. That doesn't sit well with folks around here.
"There's a war brewing down here," says JJ Creppel, an out of work fishermen who never got a chance to work for BP's lucrative cleanup program. "BP doesn't know what they've got on their hands. People have had enough."
Money is tight and the BP claims process is mired in a morass of thousands of missed payments and public confusion. The local press is now supporting the removal of the once exalted claims czar Ken Feinberg. The Mobile Press-Register called for Feinberg's ouster on Sunday, featuring a political cartoon of the Boston lawyer garbed in a bird suit feeding crumbs to pigeons. Cartoonist JD Crowe blogged on it this way:
I also recommend a regular reading of New Orleans Ladder for comprehensive coverage from Louisiana and entire Gulf region. Editilla does an extraordinary job over there with snark and a sensahumah.
And so it goes.
*
alas, people forget so easily. People can't seem to remember from one year to another.
ReplyDeleteEspecially things they don't want to remember.
I am not surprised. Katrina. BP spill. Haiti. We have nothing in terms of attention span and those who are morally charged to keep focus on such things are more interested in stories that entertain rather than inform.
ReplyDelete