ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – June 25, 2010 – A massive island-building project off the coast of Louisiana. Metal pipes and pilings strung across the Gulf entrance of Perdido Bay in Alabama. Thousands of volunteers lined up in Florida to go into action before the looming oil threat washes ashore.
Increasingly, communities are taking oil spill matters into their own hands. Rather than wait for solutions from the federal government or oil giant BP, they are launching their own countermeasures.
"People here are realizing that we're not getting the kind of response we need," says Nancy Johnson, a Mobile County spokeswoman. "They're no longer going to sit and wait and hope that their environment is protected by someone else."
Local engineers here are overseeing the installation of a 1,100-foot-long floating boom across the waterway, known as Perdido Pass. It is a local idea implemented with state dollars to keep the oil out of the bay, Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon says.
An earlier boom placed across the pass was stripped away by tidal currents. Instead of waiting for the Coast Guard and BP to improve their strategy, the city hired local engineers who came up with the new fix and tapped into $4 million of a state fund created by BP, the energy giant responsible for the oil spill.
It could have taken more than a month to get Coast Guard-BP approval, Kennon says. Acting on their own initiative, workers began the project within a day of getting environmental approval.
"No one's going to protect your backyard like you're going to protect your backyard," Kennon says.
Similar innovation is springing up elsewhere. At the mouth of the Fowl River in Mobile Bay, local officials asked the Coast Guard for more boom and a skimmer for more than a month, says Mobile County Commissioner Mike Dean, whose district includes the threatened communities. When those requests were ignored, county leaders drew up a plan to create a 600-foot-long berm made of empty oyster shells that would block the oil from spreading inland and filter the water passing through to one of the area's most sensitive estuaries.
The county is seeking $1 million from a $25 million block grant fund given to Alabama by BP for such projects, Dean says.
"We want to be proactive on this," Dean says, "not sit and wait until it gets here and the damage is done."
More than 90 million gallons of crude has gushed into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank in April, killing 11 crewmembers and sparking the largest oil disaster in U.S. history.
Filtering through ideas
Many of the plans to protect the Mississippi-Alabama-Florida Panhandle coastline were drafted years ago with input of local leaders, says Lt. Cmdr. Natalie Murphy, a Coast Guard spokeswoman in Mobile.
Increasingly, local ideas are being written into the strategy, she says. Earlier this month, one of the fishers attached an aluminum frame to his shrimping boat that scooped up more than 1 ton of tar balls, Murphy says. The Coast Guard is replicating the frame to attach to other boats. A Coast Guard official is now assigned to each county emergency operations center, listening for ideas, she says.
Another approved project: a dredging initiative to fill in a missing section of Dauphin Island off Alabama's coast.
"There's been a lot of ingenuity at the local level," Murphy says. "They know these waters best."
The most publicized local initiative has been an ambitious project to rebuild 128 miles of barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana, an idea hatched by Plaquemines Parish officials.
After weeks of pressure from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the federal government approved and BP agreed to finance a 45-mile portion of the state's plan. Local officials hope the berms will block the oil at sea, before it reaches sensitive marshes where it would be harder to remove.
The project takes advantage of local expertise, Jindal has said, because of ongoing coastal restoration work in the state.
BP agreed to pay $360 million for six sections of berm, says John Curry, a spokesman for BP.
"We're going to make things right," Curry says.
More than 150 dredging boats and barges will work simultaneously on the project, making this the largest dredging operation in U.S. history, says Garrett Graves, director of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, which is overseeing the work.
The work was needed because BP and the federal government could not produce the 11 million feet of boom the state requested to protect its 40 million feet of shoreline, Graves said.
The plan is to dredge sand from areas adjacent to some of the islands, and to take sand from "borrow sites" miles away and ship it to where other islands will be built, Graves says.
The borrow sites were identified to feed future coastal restoration projects to replace wetland that eroded because of oil and gas activities and to buffer against hurricanes. Louisiana already has restored 16,400 acres of eroded land and was in the process of restoring an additional 12,300 acres when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred.
"We're using sand resources that we were going to use to restore the coast, but now we're rebuilding this berm with it," Graves said.
Volunteers in standby mode
In Florida, where tar balls and light oiling have hit Panhandle beaches but the rest of the coast is still clear, according to NOAA, an army of volunteers has signed up to clean beaches before oil arrives or to stand by if it does.
Unlike hurricanes, when hundreds of thousands of volunteers can go into action removing debris and helping people, waiting for an oil spill to arrive has been hard for those who want to help, says Wendy Spencer of Volunteer Florida, the governor's commission on volunteerism.
"We have 14,000 volunteers registered throughout Florida," Spencer says. "Of those, about 3,000 have actually been mobilized in an activity."
Most have cleaned beaches of debris before the oil arrives, which prevents oil being carried back to sea with the tide, she says. Only trained workers paid by BP are allowed to handle the oil and fouled wildlife.
Others have helped with the influx of frustrated volunteers who can't find enough to do because the oil has not yet arrived, says Michelle Simoneau, national spokeswoman for the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary near St. Petersburg, a wild bird hospital.
"Our rescue hotline has been inundated," Simoneau says.
Many drive several hours to the sanctuary, armed with toothbrushes to help clean oiled birds. Upon arrival, "they're upset," she says. "They want to help and there's not much they can do."
Some volunteers are accepting donations of towels, toothbrushes and cash, and lending an ear to angry visitors worried about the threat to the state's seabirds during hatching season.
The sanctuary can handle about 8,000 additional patients.
"We're being told that we'll be utilized more," Simoneau says. "We're gearing up for that. Right now, we're collecting and doing what we can."
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