March 4, 2011–News from the Gulf, Part Deux

Due to high winds and huge waves, I decided to visit the wildlife refuge again to document the process of sand migration as it applies to uncovering and covering the oil shelf that remains at the beach there. When I arrived cleanup workers were being called off the beach due to poor visibility and high surf…I suppose. After a few minutes my sunglasses were completely coated in oily haze.

As I walked, slabs of oil started to be uncovered. As well, the smell of crude oil was almost unbearable today. It reminded me of the summer when this particular beach was heavily oiled.

Over lunch, I chatted with a friend who lives locally. She said that many residents believe the oil is all cleaned up and all is well. It is difficult to believe that people who live along the coast actually believe the oil is gone, but I don’t doubt it a bit. The general consensus, nationally, is the oil spill is over. Media has disappeared for the most part and so the Gulf Coast is no longer news. However, the wildlife refuge beach is still covered in oil. And from time to time the huge shelf disappears, but eventually sand is moved in the natural migration process and voila! Oil emerges from its hiding place.

After my two hour walk on the beach, I neared the boardwalk to return to my car. The major part of the oil shelf was starting to be exposed. I walked on to my vehicle and as I sat and began to take notes, I glanced over to my cameras on the other seat. They were literally DRIPPING with the oily, brown moisture that was being blown from over the Gulf across the beach. I wiped my cameras down with a white napkin and the result was a brown, oily residue on the napkin. I hesitantly wiped my face with a clean napkin and had the same result.

I apologized to my body, especially my lungs, and realized how serious the situation still is in SOME locations. Maybe the chemicals are not as volatile, but if you can smell it and see it, does it not pose some risk? Of course, last year the beaches remained open while children romped in water highly contaminated with crude oil so I do not expect any beach closings at this point. If we all believed the BP web sites and tourist boards we, too, would believe that all is well on the Gulf Coast.

Walk with me…walk and see….I just saying…..

Dare to see the truth for yourself.

March 3, 2011…At The Gulf Coast

Simone Lipscomb | March 4, 2011 at 2:55 am

The hoot of an owl in the woods across from the bay caused me to get motivated this morning. I got ready and headed to the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge for my first beach check.

As I turned onto Mobile Street, the ariel dance of two ospreys riding the high winds caused me to stop and watch their amazing flight. Further down the narrow road, tall, dried rushes rattled in the wind. Their chattering called me to my task today.

After I parked, I walked down the boardwalk toward the beach. Before I reached the shoreline, I could smell an occasional whiff of crude oil. Every time the waves are high, sunken oil gets loosened from the bottom and washes ashore.

The oil shelf that I documented in January is still present at the refuge. Sand has continued to cover it but it is obviously there. Workers were present as well, most doing a great job of digging up buried oil. I met two workers strolling with their pick-up nets, smoking cigarettes and deep in conversation–totally oblivious of the tar balls washing up on the beach. There were two crews of about eight people, supervisors, and the two women whose job appeared to be simply smoking and strolling.

The really encouraging thing at the wildlife refuge was a flock of about 25 sanderlings foraging along the tideline. I have seen very few birds there the past several visits so this was a really positive change. I also saw about eight pelicans flying offshore, two herring gulls, two ring-billed gulls, and one cormorant (flying offshore).

I noticed a gull eating one of the many crabs washed onshore. I was disappointed to see more dead crabs and crab pieces lining the beach. As I stood watching the gull ingest the crustacean, I was reminded how toxins travel throughout the food chain, throughout the web of life. None of us are immune.

My nicest surprise of the day came in the form of a US Fish and Wildlife Service employee I met at Fort Morgan. He was a great source of information about the efforts the USFWS is putting forth to ensure the protection of wildlife, especially endangered species such as the piping plovers that nest along the Gulf Coast. It made my heart lighten to know that tremendous efforts to coordinate between the USFWS and the cleanup crews are happening every day. These Wildlife Resource Technicians advise the cleanup workers, supervise the work area to keep them from nest sites and, if they are all as positive as David, provide a wonderful example in cooperation and patience.

One especially exciting observation at Ft. Morgan was the reappearance of ghost crabs. They have just started to show up again, since the spill, over the past two weeks according to the biologist I spoke with. GO GHOST CRABS!!!

After talking with the USFWS employee, I walked back to the beach access entry point and sat on the beach, enjoying pelicans and other birds interacting with the environment. After sitting for maybe ten minutes, a small group of bottlenose dolphins swam up just offshore. A large dolphin did a tail slap, some played around swimming pelicans, and then they were gone. There was one mother and baby in the group. The total number in this group has diminished since last summer.

The wind and waves were impressive on the Gulf beaches and Ft. Morgan was no exception. Fist-sized tar balls were washing up on the bay side as I walked along the shore, stirred from their slumber along the bottom.

It was good to see cleanup crews at each of the four beaches I visited today. Most were working by hand-cleaning the beaches. One area (Mobile St. access at Bon Secour NWR), had two tractors working with surface sifters…but I’m not sure that does much except take a few tar balls and grind the rest into micro-fine hydrocarbon globs.

Alabama Point, near the Florida line, looked good today. There was a variety of birds present and actively foraging. Johnson Beach, part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, looked good as well. Of course all beaches have varying amounts of tar in the form of balls or, in the case of the Mobile Street access of the wildlife refuge, a very large shelf of mostly-buried oil on shore. And there is definitely offshore oil that gets regurgitated by the Gulf when the wind and waves are high.

The Gulf Coast is a place of immense beauty with an intensity that is so great at times, I have to just sit and breathe it in. Overall there is progress being made and it appears that organization between agencies, at least on clean-up sites, is better.

I still saw no live coquina shells in the tidal zone and this greatly concerns me since they are a staple of many birds. I have not seen these shells since the oil started coming onshore last year. Another concern I had today was for the abnormally large number of bird feathers, of various species, scattered along the beach at the wildlife refuge. I have never seen so many feathers at one location.

On my way back from the beaches I usually stop by a special place in Gulf State Park where a resident great blue heron lives. I discovered, in January, he has a severely broken/twisted toe and it appears that feeding is relatively easy at this spillway. He provides a sort of balm to me so I want to publicly thank him for accepting me into his realm and spending a few moments of his day in the presence of this grateful human.

http://www.sunherald.com/2011/02/26/2895604/5-more-dead-infant-dolphins-wash.html

Friday, February 18

I am reminded of stories I’ve seen in the past few years about family members anxiously searching for lost loved-ones whose bodies never surface. The newscasters always caution that the seas often claim the bodies… and I think that must also be true for the bodies of the tiny dolphins. The 31 calves that washed ashore are probably just a fraction of the number that actually perished.

Sunday, February 20

But I am particularly concerned about the emphasis on cross-contamination in the Sun Herald story, “It’s not just a sanitation issue or that dolphins and humans share some diseases…” and “Broadway returns to her office down the hall, before she leaves, hair wet from following a strict decontamination protocol.”

Scientists haven’t ruled out a new deadly virus or bacteria causing the horrifying increase in mortality rates, so why do these scientists leave the ‘contaminated’ bodies in the surf?

Tuesday, February 22

Quoting the Sun Herald, “They bag all the equipment, tie orange tape around the tail and leave the carcass. Two of the others are more than a mile away…”

And that’s exactly what they did here on the beach in Surfside, and for more than a week my neighbors and I

Friday, February 25

called and emailed in hopes of finding someone who could either remove the body, or give us permission to do so. And for a week the tiny carcass rotted in the sun and washed in and out with the tide shedding whatever bacteria/virus/toxin that might have caused its death.

Removing the tiny body

I personally called and/or emailed the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, Alabama’s Dept of Conservation and Natural Resources, the BP hotline, the Bon Secour Wildlife Sanctuary next door to us, the Institute for Marine Mammals in Biloxi, Baldwin County’s  State Senator and Representative, and two of the television stations reporting on the investigation.

The only help we ever received was from Alabama State Representative Steve McMillan, and in the end he gave up. Even our Baldwin County legislator couldn’t get an answer. These are some of his emails from last week:

<<Checking to determine who to contact to report. Do u know if reported to proper authority?>>

<<Can you give me more detailed information about where the dolphin is located. What is the name of your subdivision? What is your phone number in case someone needs to contact you in reference to finding the dolphin?>>

<<I have put in a call for Dauphin Island Sea Lab to come and pick it up,
 They are suppose to call my office and let me know when they have picked it up. Please let me know when they do in case they forget to call. I will continue to follow up with both you and them.>>

<<WKRG 5 is going to have a special on tonight about other dolphins in the area and they are supposed to have an explanation. You may want to watch and see if it is helpful.>>

<<I spoke with Dr. Shannon at theIMMS (Institute for Marine Mammal Studies) in Gulf Port Mississippi and she told me that they had already gotten samples from the dolphin on Friday, and she said that they don’t take the dolphin back with them to the lab unless it is fresh enough for them to get a good study from it. She has contacted other authorities in the area to see who is suppose to pick them up and will get back in touch with me to let me know.  She thinks that there is a group in the Gulf Shores area that picks them up after the samples are collected. At this time they are uncertain as to what is causing the death of the baby dolphins but they are studying to find out the cause, when I hear anything else, I will let you know.>>

<<I just spoke to Dr. Shannon again, she has been unable to find anyone to pick up the dolphin.>>

and finally on Thursday

<<I will let you know if I should hear anything else.>>

I finally received an email from <<Major Chris Blankenship, Chief Enforcement Officer and Acting Director
,Alabama Marine Resources>> giving us permission to remove the body for burial, and we did so last nite.

These are both responses I received yesterday, a week after we began making calls and sendong emails:

<<Thank you for your email and concern.  I apologize for the delay in responding to your email, but as you may know we have been extremely busy during the past several weeks.  We responded to the deceased dolphin calf that you mention below a week ago as that is when it was reported to us.  We collected the appropriate biological information from the carcass, given its state of decomposition, and then tagged it for disposal.  Unfortunately, as biologists we do not have the means to dispose of every carcass that we respond to and investigate.  We usually only bring carcasses back to our lab in Gulfport, Mississippi when they are fresh enough for us to do a more complete necropsy (which is an animal autopsy).  Regretfully this calf’s carcass was not very fresh, so we obtained what information and biological specimens that we could to further investigate the circumstances surrounding its death.
 
We have been working with the government officials in the Fort Morgan, AL area to dispose of the carcass, so hopefully it will be removed from the beach soon if it has not already.  If you ever see a live or dead stranded dolphin or whale in Mississippi or Alabama, please call us on our stranding hotline number:  (888) SOS-DOLPHIN (888-767-3657).
 
Thank you again for your concern for the dolphins and their environment.
 
Sincerely,
 
Delphine Shannon, M.D.
Assistant Director of Research
Institute for Marine Mammal Studies
P.O. Box 207
Gulfport, MS 39502
(228) 896-9182, ext. 1755
(228) 701-1755 direct line
(228) 896-9183 (fax)
www.imms.org>>

and

<<Thank you for your email.  I have been in meetings in New Orleans concerning the oil spill recovery.  We have had several small dolphins that have washed ashore in Alabama and Mississippi this week.  The Mammal Stranding Network personnel have been conducting studies on them.  I do not know why they did not remove the carcass.  Sometimes they just take samples.  It is ok to dig a hole and bury it on the beach if it is still there.  We hope to have information soon on what is causing the deaths.
 
Major Chris Blankenship
Chief Enforcement Officer and Acting Director
Alabama Marine Resources
office  251-861-2882
cell    251-709-5889>>

Carolyn 'bags' the body to take to the car

How many idiots does it take a screw up an environment?

The Sun Herald has learned that 17 young dolphins, either aborted before they reached maturity or dead soon after birth, have been collected along the shorelines.

The Institute of Marine Mammal Studies performed necropsies, animal autopsies, on two of the babies today.

SUN HERALD – AMANDA McCOY/SUN HERALD Dr. Connie Chevis, DVM, left, and Dr. Joey Kaletsch, DVM, take samples while performing a necropsy on a dolphin calf at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport on Monday, February 21 2011. The calf, who is believed to be about four days old, was killed by trauma. Mobi Salangi, executive director for the institute, says there is an unusually high number of dolphin calf deaths for this time of year. They have recovered 17 calves and are performing necropsies to determine the causes of death.

Moby Solangi, director of the institute, called the high number of deaths an anomaly and told the Sun Herald that it is significant, especially in light of the BP oil spill throughout the spring and summer last year when millions of barrels of crude oil containing toxins and carcinogens spewed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil worked its way into the Mississippi and Chandeleur sounds and other bays and shallow waters where dolphins breed and give birth.

This is the first birthing season for dolphins since the spill.

Dolphins breed in the spring and carry their young for 11 to 12 months, Solangi said.

Typically in January and February, there are one or two babies per month found in Mississippi and Alabama, then the birthing season goes into full swing in March and April.

“For some reason, they’ve started aborting or they were dead before they were born,” Solangi said. “The average is one or two a month. This year we have 17 and February isn’t even over yet.”

Deaths in the adult dolphin population rose in the year of the oil spill from a norm of about 30 to 89, Solangi said.

Solangi is gathering tissue and organs for a thorough forensic study of the infant deaths and is cautious about drawing conclusions until the data is in, probably within a couple of weeks.

“We shouldn’t really jump to any conclusions until we get some results,” Solangi said. “But this is more than just a coincidence.”

The institute told the Sun Herald that it has collected 14 infant dolphins in the last two weeks and three in Mississippi today.

The institute has done a number of the autopsies, but no trend has emerged yet.

“Of the two calves on the table today, one appears to have had trauma,” Solangi said. “It was a very small calf.”

But he said that trauma to the body often occurs after a baby has died because the mother or other dolphins try to get the baby to breathe.

“I don’t believe the calf died because something hit it,” Solangi said.

“Some of the trauma you see in a baby dolphin death is the result of the mother or other animals around it trying to get it back. They don’t realize it’s dead until sometime later,” he said.

Read more about the infant dolphin deaths in Tuesday’s Sun Herald.

http://www.sunherald.com/2011/02/20/2881134/baby-dolphin-deaths-spike-on-gulf.html#ixzz1EgUhYPy5

Baby dolphin

Tagged by BP, and left to rot as the sun sets.

Rest In Peace

 

UPDATE

Sunday, February 20

The little body was still laying at the edge of the surf Sunday evening….

Approaching the GRITS house

I could hear the BP equipment down on the beach this morning, but it was sunny and it was my day off, so Sophie & I went for a walk in spite of it all. As we approached the GRITS house we could see the tractors and machinery at the end of the boardwalk, but the beach was accessible today.

'Parking lot' at the Million Dollar View house

The equipment had moved a few yards west of the area they were working on Wednesday and that beach, at the edge of Morgantown, was now cordoned off with yellow ‘caution tape’.  They had harrowed our stretch of beach, again, so we crossed over the sifted sand and walked up the stretch of Surfside officially proclaimed ‘clean’ by the BP folks after the “Deep Clean”.

The beach is harrowed daily, but you can see the layer of tar in the sand bank

We saw thousands of little tar balls at the edge of the surf, freshly broken off the big tar mats plastered just past the 2nd sand bar, about 50 yards out into the Gulf. And where the water had eroded the beach we saw a layer of tar about a foot below the sand… and that layer of sand was noticeably browner than the sugar-white sand below it.

Layer of tar

There was an unusually large number of people out walking today, enjoying the rare sunshine and chatting with neighbors. I met snowbirds from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Tennessee. Well, technically folks from Tennessee probably aren’t normally snowbirds…. but this year they certainly were! They had escaped the record-breaking snow and ice for a little peace & quiet on the beach this week, and they were disappointed.

The agreement among the visitors today was pretty much unanimous, the cleanup operation is a sham. It’s easy to see

oiled layers of sand

the tar is still on, and under, our beach… and we will be dealing with it and/or BP for many years to come.

fresh BP turds on the 'clean' beach this morning

Photo taken February 9th on the beach at Surfside

Property owners received this letter February 1 from the ‘president’ of the unofficial, voluntary Surfside Subdivision homeowner’s association:

<Surfside Shores

It has been very quiet here except for the increase in the amount of the heavy equipment and contractors with their pickups that Bp was bringing into our neighborhood. The end of Surfside drive was crammed and I finally got exasperated and about 2 weeks ago went to see the City of Gulf Shores to whom Bp reports. They arranged a meeting with myself and the Bp man in charge down here. He was very cordial and understood my position and agreed that they would pull out of Surfside by month end. True to his word Bp removed all equipment from our area (as of yesterday) and moved it down to Cortez St.

There will still be a couple of ATV’s here as they need them to patrol the shoreline and look for tar balls but otherwise all is quiet. Very few tar balls are found these days. One renter told me that she was looking for a tar ball to take back home to show her grandson but could not find one.

There are indications that the tourist are coming back in healthy numbers but we will have to see what actually happens.

Ralph Gilges>> 

Well…. it isn’t quiet on our end of Surfside Shores, we have heavy equipment digging up the beach. The roar and the ‘beeping and booping’ starts early in the morning can be heard 4 blocks away. Last Sunday, February 6, they were still on the beach long after dark. 

"otherwise all is quiet" ???

We would be happy to have them if we believed they were doing anything more than generating paychecks and providing a ‘presence’ for the television cameras and BP’s big PR campaign. 

But we’ve watched them ‘work’ for over 10 months now and we believe the biologists at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab… they’re just creating a ‘dead zone’ on the beach. The oil still lies just offshore and will continue to wash ashore with every storm. The tar ball experts with butterfly nets, and the harrows, and front-end loaders are doing more harm than good. The tourists are actually leaving early because of their ‘cleanup operation’ and the sea oat roots that once secured the sand on the first row of dunes are gone, poisoned and plowed into oblivion.

God help us when the first tropical storm hits the peninsula this summer….

West

South

East

North

The Shadows Gather

Two weeks ago this is how the beach at Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge looked…COVERED with a thick shelf of oil. Yesterday the NY Times ran an article with this headline: REPORT FORESEES QUICK GULF OF MEXICO RECOVERY. Does anyone notice a discrepancy in the photograph I took a couple weeks ago and the image Mr. Feinburg is painting of the Gulf Coast?

As I sat finishing my breakfast, I read the article posted on Facebook and about jumped off my chair with anger. The report says the Gulf should recover by the end of 2012. Perhaps they are counting on the Mayan calendar’s expiration and the potential end of the world as we know it to make this prediction. Seriously! I spoke with a wildlife biologist last Saturday and she said it takes a minimum of 3 to 5 years for wildlife populations to show the true picture after an event such as this. Maybe Mr. Feinburg–I mean BP–has resorted to wishful thinking as their modus operandi.

Wes Tunnell, a marine biologist at Texas A & M, wrote the report that said some areas will have fewer fish, shrimp and crab but overall regional 2011 catches for blue crabs, shrimp, oysters and fin fishes should be in line with catches before the spill. By the way, he was paid by BP to write the document. And…he doesn’t offer any estimates on how much hydrocarbon residue is expected to be found in said seafood species. Whatever happened to non-biased scientific data collection? Oh, the oil companies run the country…how silly of me to forget.

From the beginning of the spill I have thought the Coast Guard to be a puppet of BP…of oil corporations. From watching Rear Admiral Mary Landree mindlessly nod her head in press briefings by Doug Suttles, the BP spokesperson during the spill, to this latest bogus report by scientists funded by BP (isn’t that in itself a conflict of interest?)…the Coast Guard agrees with anything BP says. Again…I cry FOUL! and….WAKE UP AMERICA!

A voice of sanity is included in the Times article. Dr. James Cowan, a biological oceanographer at LSU said his group has found “troubling signs of apparent oil damage” to shrimp and fish. “In my mind, the long-term, indirect effects are going to be the most insidious and also the most difficult to ascertain,” he said.

This past summer I witnessed local government officials laughing at ‘dumb tourists’ swimming (yes….I have video footage) in crude oil. I heard one mayor say ‘we have to get the clean-up workers off the beach during the day…it is scaring the tourists’ (yep…got THAT on video as well). So should we be surprised at the continued denial of the damage that was done and how it continues to affect the Gulf Coast? Absolultely NOT! No surprise here. So how can an article like this help us? It can give us a renewed sense of purpose to ensure the light of truth be presented through reporting true stories, showing images and video, and through voices that are LIVING IT. Let the TRUTH dispel the shadows before they completely cover-up the real story of what is happening along the Gulf Coast.

This shows a block of hardened crude oil washed ashore mid-January 2011. Who said the oil is gone? It’s over? Hardly any workers were to be seen with hundreds of tons of crude oil imbedded in the beach in the wildlife refuge. BP has not even cleaned up the mess yet they are claiming within two years everything will be great, back to normal? This is the height of insanity.

The cars and trucks roll through our sleepy neighborhoods before sunup every morning, the noisy machinery relentlessly tears up the beach ’till sunset every day, and there is no respite. Except for one week at Christmas and three days at Thanksgiving we’ve had these intruders in our world for nine months, day into night, seven days a week.

We’ve had no glorious sunrises or peaceful sunsets, and the clang and roar of the tractors, harrows and sifters drown out the gentle surf and songs of the visiting birds. No quiet walks on the beach, or Sunday afternoons with a book or fishing pole.

Our local television stations and newspapers are filled with BP ads loudly claiming they’re ‘making it right’…  and I’m sure it looks that way to our northern neighbors reading about the time and money spent on equipment and crews.  Even our friends on the bay side believe the ‘sand sharks’ and sweepers are busy cleaning the remnants of the oil and tar from our sugar-white beaches.

But they’re not.

I don’t know what Betsy thought about the ‘cleanup’ before she came for a visit, but I know she was angry when she left Sunday because of what she witnessed. This is what she saw…

On Sunday night, January 9th, a wicked storm churned the gulf and pushed the surf high on the beach. The next morning we walked from the old governor’s mansion, the entire length of the Surfside beach, to the western edge at the little yellow GRITS house. We passed the usual BP equipment and tar ball pickers, but the only significant oil we saw was at the edge of Morgantown….

Oily tide pool at the edge of Surfside Shores and Morgantown left after the storm

and the BP crews were driving through it. Honestly, they appeared to be driving out of their way to drive through the middle of what had been a little tide pool.

BP tracks through the oil on January 10, 2011

Abandoned beach January 10, 2011...BP tracks headed to the oil

And obviously the BP tar ball pickers were somewhat concerned about this accumulation on the beach, there is evidence they stopped with their buckets and attempted to sweep the goo….

Oily residue on the beach

Yes, it looks, feels, and smells like oil

Blowing sand covers the tar pit on Wednesday

BP crew picks at tar balls on Wednesday near the goo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heavy machinery moves down to Morgantown on Tuesday

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tar pit is undisturbed Tuesday afternoon, but the markers have been removed

 

 

And this weekend, the tractors and sharks are back, again, on the beach, sifting and raking the same sand in front of the GRITS house, over and over, and over…. for nine long months

 

And the tar pit nearby, created by the storm January 9,  is now completely covered by blowing sand. 

Heavy equipment back on the beach January 23, only yards from the tar pit that was never cleaned

 

Are they blind? Are they stupid? Or are they arrogant because they’re winning the PR war and they know there’s nothing we can do about it…. no one is watching anymore.

Gulf Coast–January 2011 Summary

Simone Lipscomb | January 19, 2011 at 10:43 pm

My first day out, January 10th, yielded major oil at the surf zone. But this time in the form of a hardened shelf of crude. Recent winter storm waves had exposed the shelf and deposited oil from the bottom of the Gulf, according to a supervisor on one of the clean-up crews, on the beach. It was as bad as I’ve seen the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge since I begin documenting this disaster in May 2010. The only difference was it was 60 degrees cooler than the July and August temperatures that made it a living hell on the beaches with horrible smells; thick, gooey, melted petroleum coated sand and mats of oil floated in the Gulf then. Now at least it is hardened. It seems reasonable that NOW would be the time to remove the oil from the beach…right? But the clean-up crews are understaffed and sometimes not even present.

Two days later and sand, from a hefty north wind, had nearly covered the oil shelf. People might be tempted, in looking at this sight, to say, “It’s not so bad.” They just need to see what lies just beneath the surface to fully comprehend the amount of oil still present on the beach at the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge.

Ft Morgan beach had some small tar balls but nothing else evident. But understand this: It depends on the day you visit, the way the wind is blowing, and the strength of the waves to see the truth about the amount of oil on the beach. My two visits to the national wildlife refuge clearly proved that.

The day I visited Ft. Morgan the wind was out of the north at 35mph and the temperature was 41 degrees coming across Mobile Bay. Thank goodness the North Carolina mountain winters have taught me how to stay warm in such conditions. There was a fair amount of shore birds on the Gulf beach including sanderlings, brown pelicans, willets, ruddy turnstones, and gulls. It was heartening to see a nice-size bird flock at Ft. Morgan, especially since the oil-laden beaches at the wildlife refuge, 10 miles east, were nearly vacant of birdlife.

Gulf State Park Pier beaches had been, or were in the process of being, deep-cleaned. There was some light oiling washing up on the beach but not many noticeable tar balls. There were birds present, although not in the typical winters numbers I would expect.

The foot ‘issues’ I have been documenting were evident in one gull in the flock there at Gulf State Park.

On this trip I was able to spend one day enjoying the coastal treasures I grew up with. Romar beach had been deep-cleaned and looked pretty good. Very few birds were present but the water appeared quite nice.

Alabama Point and the Gulf Islands National Seashore provided me with delightful hours that nurtured my weary spirit. I thought, as I wandered along the beaches, how strange it was that an ecosystem still struggling to recover and heal could provide me with such healing. It was nice to spend time connecting with the raw, intense beauty of the Gulf Coast.

My visit was a study in contrasts. One beach was heavily covered in oil while another might look okay. There was bird life on some beaches while it was absent on others. It’s difficult to form much of an opinion from four days of beach visits but it was very telling to see so much oil exposed one day and almost completely covered two days later. The summary for my January visit is this: There is much that remains hidden about the oil spill and recovery…and I mean that on many levels.

I have seen a lot of different situations over the 35 plus years of selling, then later manufacturing farm equipment. However, none of it compares to the scope and magnitude of the Gulf shore cleanup, following the massive oil spill. There was no template in place for such a temporary cleanup effort of this scope for BP to draw from. Throw in the heated emotions of the entire event, and it left BP in a tough position to restore our Gulf beaches and get it done fast. The entire effort was put together in a matter of weeks, and continues on through this day (Dec. 17th from when this article was written.) With government regulations, bad press, and shady contractors, I certainly don’t envy BP during this event. I do feel they are doing the best that they can, and really are attempting to restore our Gulf shores to their pristine natural state.

Our story with BP and the cleanup began when a contractor working on BP’s behalf purchased forty one tractors from a local dealership in the South. They had requested these tractors be delivered to the primary staging area in Mobile, AL, and they needed them within ten days.

The contractor had asked the salesman at the dealership if he knew of a piece of equipment that could smooth and level the sand in a fast and efficient manner. The salesman didn’t have an answer to the query on the spot, and promised to look into it.

It was our website, www.wingfields.com, that introduced the Wingfield Flexible Harrow to the Gulf shore cleanup effort. After finding that none of his suppliers could assist, he turned to other avenues to find the proper piece of equipment. The salesman had come across our site and noted that our harrow was used to level and firm soil – mainly for agricultural use.

The harrow he found on our site is mounted on a three point frame with skids to control height and is available in widths up to 23 feet with hydraulic folding wings for transport. Wanting more information, he emailed our company, requesting prices on five 20 foot models to level the beaches. After reviewing the email, I called the dealer and found an urgent need for our harrow. I recommended that we bring a unit to the Gulf for a demonstration within 2 to 3 days. I then loaded a 20 foot unit into my pickup, and at the last moment, I decided to add an optional smoothing pipe across the back of the harrow which transformed our pasture harrow into a beach harrow. We then proceeded the 800 miles to the Gulf.

I was instructed to drive to the main staging area where I first saw how large this operation was going to be. This massive field was filled with all kinds of equipment, potty houses, trailers, plus many other items. I was asked by the contractor to deliver the harrow directly to Johnson Beach on Perdido Key, FL.

Upon arriving at the satellite staging area there was a lot of activity, and a lot of amenities for the workers: a huge white tent with large tubes attached to a generator/air conditioner, several hand washing stations in front of the tent and a large box ice truck. On the asphalt behind the truck, new, big white coolers were being filled with bottled water and ice. There were two semi-trailers, tractors, trailers, and potty houses scattered about in an orderly fashion. Everything that sat on this lot was brand new, and were all flanked with orange cones for safety.

After trying unsuccessfully to find someone in charge, I was finally given a space in front of the tent to setup the harrow – after dropping the name of the manager I had dealt with at the main staging area. I unloaded the harrow and positioned it for assembly when suddenly four red cones were positioned on the corners around the work area, followed by yellow caution tape which outlined our construction area. We were safe, and so was anybody that walked by! This was my first exposure, of many, to various regulations and red tape (in addition to yellow caution tape) that would occur while assisting in the beach cleanup. I finished the setup of the harrow, left to find a hotel, and I returned the next morning for the demonstration.

That next morning, I arrived at the satellite staging area where I was faced with an entirely different group of people (that is when I found the workers were on twelve hour shifts). It was difficult to acquire the right tractor, a person who could operate the tractor, plus anyone who worked there who might know how to hook the unit up to the tractor. Clearly these were not farmers…

I finally had reached the beach, and was eager to see how the unit would perform. However, before I could get the demonstration underway, I encountered two problems in the 95 degree temperature: a park ranger from Colorado had difficulty deciding exactly where on the beach I could demonstrate the unit, and a gentleman in a long sleeved shirt wanting to mount a decibel meter on the tractor. The decibels of noise at various r.p.m. for this tractor are of course published information, generally found on each piece of literature at any dealership. But this man spent 15 minutes trying to convince the tractor’s operator that he was the only person qualified to make the determination of just how loud this tractor was. Out of frustration, I mentioned to the park ranger to tell him that if his concern was about the tractor noise, perhaps he might consider mounting the meter on the next wave and shut down the ocean first, because its noise was blocking any tractor noise!

Finally, with decisions and concessions made, my long awaited harrow demonstration could begin. After a few passes, I had the harrow, the tractor, and the operator adjusted, and was satisfied with the results. I had the driver make a pass just above the high tide level in the loose sand. This pass would simulate how the surface of the beach would appear after each oil cleanup operation was completed. It did not seem many people were watching the demonstration, but I was pleased with the way the sand was groomed using the Wingfield Beach Harrow. I was very hot, was given a bottle of water, and returned to the beach-front hotel that I had found late the night before in Orange Beach, AL.

This large hotel was 10 floors high and one half block wide, but only had five vehicles in the parking lot on June 24, 2010. This indicated how devoid of people and tourists this area was. Normally, it would be packed. It reminded me of entering New Orleans seven weeks after hurricane Katrina to retrieve my daughter’s car, except there was no visible sign of damage here, just an eerie lack of people. Fifteen minutes after I got into the hotel room, I received a call from the dealer (who was supplying the contractor) and he gave me an order for six more 20 foot Wingfield Beach Harrows. After several negotiating calls, and with my understanding of the urgent need for our product, I agreed to deliver the units to the beach in seven days.

We are a small company with dedicated employees which allowed me to leave our plant five days later with the complete order and the paint still drying along the way. The next day and 800 mile behind me, I was assisting with the setup.

Following these deliveries, I would call down to the Gulf dealeship for feedback on how the harrows were performing and was told they had no information, good or bad, on the harrows. By the end of July, I was contacted by a different dealer near the Gulf asking about a harrow exactly like the units that were being used for the cleanup effort. He only had a picture of our harrow working on the beach and asked certain questions to verify we were the manufacturer. After confirming we were the harrow manufacturer, he placed an order for the same model for the city of Orange Beach, AL. They wanted the harrow to maintain the eight miles of beach the city was in charge of. We have remained in contact with their beach department and they are completely satisfied.

After that sale, we hadn’t heard anything until Wednesday, October 13th at 10 AM. That morning I received a call from a person who was in the BP purchasing department. This was my first contact with anymore directly or indirectly from the company itself. He asked if we were the manufacturer of the harrows that were being used on the beach and asked if I knew where they were located now. I had told him that I had not seen or heard anything about them since I had delivered the six units the end of June. He had stated the contractor in charge of the cleanup was cancelled soon after the oil stopped floating onto the shore; and that now, BP was directly in charge of any future oil removal from the beach. He said he would research the location of the harrows and call me if he had any questions.

Within ten minutes of our first call, he called back to tell me that the original harrows belonging to the terminated contractor had been moved to a location in Houston, TX. This contractor was expecting BP to pay a premium price above list price for these used harrows, harrows for which BP had already paid a hefty lease payment to the contractor. No wonder this cleanup is going to drain BP, and this is just one example!

At this time, with 99% of the visible oil at the beach surface removed, BP was committed to removing the oil below the surface of the beach itself. BP was digging test holes in the sand to determine which areas would need to be tilled with a moldboard plow to a depth of 12 to 18 inches. The plow would expose the dry oil pieces which were then sifted manually, and removed. This operation left a very rough surface and every day the beach had to be plowed, oil removed, and leveled only at low tide and before high tide. I was sure our harrow would do the job, but I recommended a 10 foot model to the man in charge, due to the smaller areas in which they were operating. He stated he would need to contact five other people in his company via email for an agreement before he could even place the order and asked how soon two units could be shipped. I told him he needed to give us a purchase order by 4 PM that day, since we already had a truck heading south to attend the Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, GA. I told him that we could deliver the units two days later, if he could meet that deadline.

Within four hours our company received a purchase order for two 10 foot beach harrows, and with this, BP faxed the papers for us to become a vendor for BP (this showed us how desperate they were for the harrows, as normally this procedure would take weeks to finalize). There were five pages of instructions, with the first page coming from BP’s legal counsel notifying us that we would have to keep all paperwork, correspondence, as well as emails – as long as we both shall live. The information required for us to provide a full page of department numbers, assignment numbers, signatures, and titles on each individual invoice, and this was before any equipment was even listed.

Two afternoons later, I was entering BP’s temporary compound. It was quite an interesting experience. Two or three guards at the entrance were there to sign you in and then call to the headquarters building for permission to enter. I was directed to go to the office to obtain clearance for a place to unload, and to arrange for workers to assist with assembly. The five workers they sent along to “help” rode up on a brand new RTV without any tools, not even a wrench among them. However, they did have a government safety officer watching over them like a cat ready to pounce. Finally, with our safety assured, the harrows were assembled, the paperwork was signed in triplicate, and I proceeded onto the farm show in Georgia.

After the show, I returned to the Gulf to see how the units were performing. I found out the harrows had been in use the entire time, as the cleanup effort was a 24/7 operation. I went to a section of open beach where it was just workers and equipment. There I had the opportunity to talk to the men operating the harrow, see for myself how the unit was working, and was able to take pictures of the beautiful condition it was leaving the beach. All was well.

The next morning I drove to the beach where another harrow was working. This beach was parallel to apartment buildings close to the beach. Only about 20 feet of actual beach was available to beach goers and tourists, and the rest was cordoned off with yellow caution tape for several hundred feet. Here there were numerous safety people in yellow vests overseeing the operation. I saw one person in a yellow vest whose entire job was to escort people from an apartment complex across the work zone to the beach, and back again when they were finished relaxing on their 20 feet of beach. It was here I noticed the harrow wasn’t adjusted properly, and I stepped over the tape to advise the driver. Big mistake! Immediately, a safety person escorted me to the other side of the tape. After some time I was able to signal the operator to drive along the caution tape so I could adjust the harrow. While I was doing the adjustment, a safety person instructed me that I had to quit interfering with the harrow – as an EPA official was wanting me to leave the beach for holding up the cleanup effort. Although my adjustments would actually speed up the process, you just can’t get through to some people.

Two weeks later, I received a call from the manager of the main BP staging area. He said that BP had decided to remove oil particles to a depth of 4 feet, whether it was from their spill or earlier deposits – they were taking no chances. They had a total of 35 miles of beach that needed to be worked; and he ordered four more harrows, to be shipped ASAP. Understanding the urgency and dedication BP had been showing, we once again rushed out the units and they were up and running inside a week.

Then following week, we received a call from a contractor who was doing beach cleanup work for BP on Dauphin Island, AL, just west of the BP cleaning area. After viewing the leveling and finish our harrows had provided for BP’s operation, they ordered four 10 foot beach harrows for the deep cleaning operations that BP insisted they perform on the beach, for which the contractor was responsible for. All of these harrows were shipped in four days.

During the last 60 days (Oct. 15 – Dec 15) we have delivered sixteen of our 10 foot beach harrows to level and smooth the beaches along the Gulf coast. So far, everyone who has operated the units have had nothing but praise.

I am impressed with what BP has done, so far, to clean and improve our Gulf shoreline. They have insisted that all workers be friendly and polite to all people using the beach during this crisis and have strived to return our beaches to their natural pristine beauty after each cleaning operation. It seems fitting that a quality American made product is being used in the cleanup of our beaches, and the Wingfield employees are proud our harrow was chosen to assist in the restoration of beautiful Gulf region. The only ugly things that remain for us seem to be the attitudes of those government safety officers, and I surely can’t do a thing about them…

-Dean Wingfield

© 2010

When Wingfield Harrows Met the Gulf Cleanup Effort

tracks left at Surfside on January 3, 2011 by a Wingfield harrow

The BP crews have returned after a blessed 9 day respite and the first thing they did was HARROW the beach!

You don’t have to be a Kentucky farm girl to understand the purpose of a harrow, the very definition is, <<a cultivating implement set with spikes, spring teeth, or disks and used primarily for pulverizing and smoothing the soil>> The effect of this equipment on our beach was obvious to all who stopped to watch.

They were pulverizing the tar balls so they could never be sifted or screened and removed.

A few minutes later one of the oblivious speeding 4-wheelers roared past us down the beach in the newly ‘”smoothed” sand…..  I wondered if the BP contractors had harrowed this stretch of the beach because they were concerned that some of their equipment might become stuck in the tar balls on the beach (reported Sunday in the Mobile Press-Register), or maybe they were afraid someone had booby-trapped the sand in their absence?

four-wheeler tracks in the wake of the harrow

But, as I watched, another four-wheeler raced back up the beach, narrowly avoiding the poor man walking his dog in the surf, far from the newly-harrowed trail. Poor tourist… braving the BP chaos to walk his dog in the surf.

BP four-wheeler avoiding a tourist

I searched through photos of harrows ’till I found the Illinois company who supplied them to BP, and they have a very interesting account of their recent trips to the Gulf. I doubt they’ll leave it online very long once they realize why BP really ordered 16 of their 10-ft harrows.

http://www.wingfields.com/gulfarticle.htm

BP stations a pair of these 'experts' with nets at 20 - 50 yard intervals along the beach

The relentless BP 'comfort stations' running up and down the beach to service the tar ball experts

My walk on the beach at Surfside this morning