Mainstream Media Helps BP Pretend There's No Oil 28JUL10 & BP Fires 10,000 Cleanup Workers 6AUG10 from MOJO

— By Mac McClelland

| Wed Jul. 28, 2010 11:07 AM PDT

"WASHINGTON (AFP) – With BP's broken well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone's lips is: where is all the oil?"
NEW ORLEANS (Mother Jones) – I don't know who the fuck these everyones are, but I'm happy to help out them, and ABC, and this AFP reporter writing that due to BP's stunningly successful skimming and burning efforts, "the real difficulty now is finding any oil to clean up."
I sent one text message to Bloomberg's Lizzie O'Leary, who's standing on Grand Isle, Louisiana, right now, asking how the beach looks. "Lower part past the barrier untouched with globs of oil that washed up last night," she said. By "untouched," she means by cleanup crews, and that "barrier" she's talking about is the one the press isn't allowed past. I sent another text to Drew Wheelan, who's also in Southwestern Louisiana, doing bird surveys for the American Birding Association, asking him how big the biggest tar mat on Grand Terre—the scene of those now famous horrifying oiled-bird photos—is. "20 feet by 15," he said. "But bigger ones submerged slightly."
If I managed to find that much oil with my BlackBerry without getting dressed or leaving the house, let's hope Thad Allen, who is quoted in the article as saying, "What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it," can locate some more with the staff and craft of the United States Coast Guard at his disposal. As for the reporter's alarmingly unsubstantiated claim that "The beaches should be relatively painless to mop up," I can't even count the number of correspondents down here who've pointed out that digging a finger under the surface of supposedly clean sand turns up crude, or the number of cleanup workers who've said cleanup efforts are strictly cosmetic, or that no matter what they do the contamination just keeps bubbling up.
It's BP's job to whitewash this story and make it easier to indulge the desire to forget about the scope of the devastation, guys. Not the media's.

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  BP Fires 10,000 Cleanup Workers

  http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2010/08/bp-cuts-more-10000-oil-spill-cleanup-workers

   
  — By Mac McClelland

  

  New BP CEO Bob Dudley wasn't kidding when he announced last week that it was time for the company to scale back oil-spill cleanup operations. In fact, by the time he'd said that, the responder force had been drawn down by about 25 percent.
  
  On July 13, the Deepwater Horizon Joint Command was reporting 46,000 responders. On July 23, it was down to 30,000, and the numbers have hovered around the low 30s since. Included in this tally are some Coast Guard and National Guard staff, but BP and subcontractors comprise the vast majority. (I've been trying to get the exact breakdown from the Coast Guard for four days, but to no avail, and BP said it didn't have it on hand, though the Coast Guard has told me it just reports BP's numbers.) In Grand Isle, Louisiana, cleanup workers (none of whom can be named; you know this drill by now) say their coworkers were either told to go home for Tropical Storm Bonnie and then never called back or fired in a massive and sudden drug test.
  
  "Friday, the day before Bonnie, they sent a bunch of people home until further notice, and a lot of people didn't get the further notice," one supervisor told me. "Then last week, they shut the whole [cleanup operation] down. It was 'Piss in a cup or throw your ID in the bucket.' This was a BP drug test, not a [subcontracting] company drug test. It's the first time BP tested us."
  
  A BP spokesman told me that all its subcontractors are required to drug test their cleanup employees and allow BP to do random checks itself; it just happened to do one of those checks last week. But the cleanup workers believe the company's motivation was to fire a bunch of people fast. Maybe it's because they're conspiracy theorists. Or maybe it's because the subcontractors had long had openly lax substance-abuse standards. "Most of those people had never been drug tested before," the supervisor told me. "I worked for two different subcontractors that didn't test me." He also pointed out that the local bar's parking lot is nightly full of company cars and drunk guys who drive them; one cleanup worker I met had a picture in his phone of beer cans in the cupholders of cleanup vehicles in broad daylight. "They wanted to get rid of people, and drug testing was a good way to do it. I used to supervise 30 guys; now I've got 10."
  
  The scaleback is set to continue. Supervisors say they're supposed to break down to just a "skeleton crew" by the end of September, so hopefully the media myth that there's no more oil anywhere comes true. "Everything still changes day to day," the supervisor told me. "You don't know when a bunch of oil's gonna pop up."

   

"We Don't Need This on Camera": BP's Crappy Cleanup Job 11JUN10

You know Isle Grande Terre, Louisiana, from the unbelievable pictures of oiled birds taken there last week. It's also the island just to the east of Grand Isle, which I've been reporting on since oil made landfall there several weeks ago. I wanted to check up on Grande Terre, and so to get there, and avoid a BP escort, yesterday I got in a kayak with my intrepid former literature professor from the University of New Orleans and paddler extraordinaire, Dr. John Hazlett.
On the way, we beached ourselves on an uninhabited spit near Grand Isle State Park. It was completely covered in oil, and there were no cleanup crews in sight. 
Nor was there any boom across Barataria Pass, which is a gateway to wetlands:

After a while, a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries employee trailing half a dozen big & tall men behind her appeared. She flagged us down and told us nobody should be walking on that beach because it was a wildlife reserve. Which, considering the amount of oil (massive) and level of cleanup taking place (none), was pretty alarming. Plus, as a big guy next to her wearing a shirt from ES&H, the main cleanup contractor here, said, "We don't need this on camera." Which is why BP's contractors have their workers on a gag order: because sometimes they say stupid shit like that.
We paddled on and pulled up on Grande Terre, where the oil stretched as far as we could see in deep dark pools. We encountered a cleanup crew supervisor gunning around on his ATV, who said there were all of 30 workers on the whole island, which he said is five miles long. For the hour we walked around, only three of them were working anyway, while the rest sat in the shade. And the work consisted of somewhat haphazardly laying down paper towels. [Update/clarification: Though the workers referred to them as paper towels, they are indeed slightly thicker, oil-absorbent pads, as several commenters have pointed out. Since that wouldn't be clear to everyone from the pictures, I definitely should have been less cheeky and more specific: These are very fancy towels that a few dudes are dropping along the shore to combat the multimillion-gallon spill.]
 
Also, we found a dead dolphin. 
That was about all we could take, what with a heat index of 105 and the rowing we had to do back to Grand Isle and I was already getting a little woozy. At least I kept my wits enough about me to remember to keep my mouth closed when waves splashed water thick with oil into my face. I suppose the 60 or so dolphins swimming the pass with us don't have that option; things got a little (more) depressing in the kayak when we saw that they were blowing it out through their holes. They'd probably like to take the double scrubbing-down with dishwashing liquid we took when we got home, too.

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