By Michael Mee
CNHI
—
If you haven’t read in past columns, I was raised on the Gulf Coast.
I won’t lie, I miss it terribly sometimes. Especially during Mardi Gras and in the summer time.
People sometimes say “You spend half of your life trying to get away from [insert your hometown here] and the other half trying to get back.”
While the first half of that is true for me, I won’t say that I’ve been in any hurry to relocate my family back on the Gulf Coast before the oil spill two months ago.
But now, with the spill being nearly the only thing people are talking about on radio and television, I must say that it is giving me reason to remember just what it is about the coast that makes it so special and what is now in jeopardy since crude oil is beginning to wash up on the white sand beaches of Gulf Shores and Dauphin Island.
Whenever I would stand on the balcony of a high-rise condo when I was working as a painter in Gulf Shores, I was always in awe of the scenery.
From that height you can look down and see the huge sting rays swimming feet from the beach-goers, boats milling about near the shore and on the horizon, the oil platforms that are as much of my memories from growing up near the beach as anything else.
When I was in grade school, I used to get my dad’s big binoculars and look out at night to see the oil rigs all lit up.
Some of my friends’ dads worked out there as rough necks or engineers. Some of the guys I played baseball and basketball with work out there now.
I can only imagine what it was like for the families of the 11 men killed to hear of the explosion by television and have to wait, hope and pray that their dads or husbands weren’t the ones feared “missing” and then pronounced dead and lost in the Gulf.
Now the oil spill catastrophe, which has beaten a weekly drum to “We tried, it failed. We tried, it failed” has reached Alabama soil.
As the oil leaks out, it is killing untold millions of fragile aquatic life forms and in the last week dead, oil-covered animals are washing up along the coast.
The smell has inundated the coast. People in Mobile can smell the oil and they have described it in news reports as being acrid or like burning plastic.
Clean up workers offshore and in Louisiana’s wetlands are complaining of flu-like symptoms due to the odor and have asked for the EPA to step in and provide them with masks.
For a place that holds so many memories for me, I shudder daily to think what the final outcome will be. It’s not going to be pretty. The economy down there, which is largely derived from tourism dollars, is and will continue to be hit hard. Very hard. While Alabama only has 55 miles of coast, that area accounts for millions and millions of dollars that flow north throughout the state and fund our infrastructure and some educational needs.
Those needs aren’t going to go away anytime soon. But the tourists might if the beaches are covered in crude. As they go, so does much-money needed in this state.
This catastrophe has raised a point I used to tell many and still do: private industry works better than government at fixing things.
But this spill highlights what happens when private companies don’t have a Plan C if disaster strikes. So now I must agree that the federal government needs to (have already) step up and help in a big way.
Will they? Time will tell.
The whole thing stinks [period].
