Since our boat has been in Fourchon, LA, one of the nerve centers of the oil spill response, I and my fellow crew members have just been inundated 24 hours a day with everything oil spill.
Not only is our barge being hacked at, opened up and welded on to facilitate the equipment that will retrieve oil from the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, but every direction we look has something to do with BP and their mess.
Below is a container being lowered onto the barge.
I have no idea what purpose this will serve other than to ugly up an already ugly barge.
Glance in any direction and you see temporary housing stacked on barges like so many building blocks, to house the thousands of workers who have flooded this Bayou to help in the response.
Below I captured a woman who looks to be chillin on her temporary front porch, maybe calling home to report on the work she's been doing. Or, ordering a pizza.
I have no idea.
Our barge is slowly being transformed from a big ugly oil barge to a big ugly oil response vessel.
The work intensified today and is expected to stay that way until Kevin Costner's miracle machines show up and are installed on the barge.
I don't know how long these preparations will take, our office personnel doesn't feel like we should be included into the circle of trust.
BP says there are 7000 boats and 46000 people working in some way on the clean up. I guess last week they only had 45,999 people involved.
I just got here a couple of days ago.
6 comments:
Mark,
Amazing scene! You and your camera have a way of making a messy situation look not so bad. What are the three towering pillar-like structures sticking up from the barge?
I heard/read today BP may have a solution in place this week to cap the well and capture 100% of the oil escaping. Are you optimistic? Does your barge go out to the very site of the well? The scope of the operation is mind boggling. I can't wait for more pictures this week? Do you keep your Internet connection wherever you are?
Jerral
Don't ya love it!? Hurry up and wait. I think the woman standing on the deck with phone in ear says it all. Sorry you are still not cleaning the spill!! Seems like that is the operation on the day...WAIT! Sheesh!
This is such a mess!! Argh!
Hugs
SueAnn
Unreal. And are all of those boats and people waiting around for re-rigging and equipment arrivals and pizza delivery? I bet it's not easy making a temporary home for yourself out of those temporary homes.
What does your barge do if it comes across wildlife in distress? I bet there isn't much you can do, and that will be difficult mentally. Good luck, Mark. We'll be watching.
yep....i think it was pizza she was ordering :)
this hurry up and wait game....ARRGHH....especially after all that go go go flowing in your veins after hours and hours of soccer.....how frustrating !
and king james....sheesh, enough already.....although now all i can think about is the mansion he'll have in miami....heck, what am i saying, he'll own the city.
thinking of you and all "your guys" with hopes of things coming together more quickly now that you're all there :)
In a way you're lucky, Mark. As the rest of us sit holding our breath and moaning about the crisis, you're actually contributing to fixing it.
I can only imagine how frustrated and tired those hundreds of thousands of workers are. There just doesn't seem to be a light at the end of this tunnel.
Good luck and be careful!
this job is taking so long. I wish it was all done already. It makes me nervous that the sea is so dirty for so long because we are so stupid...
But then there are also the wonderful people like you and this woman and all the other people in the little rooms (I get claustrophobic just thinking about the size of those rooms) who are going to make things all right (right?) pretty soon. It's good that we have both the stupid and the wonderful, but perhaps we could have neither...
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