An Inside Look at Oil Spill Cleanup
Content
An Insider look at Oil Spill Cleanup Christopher Klug
I need five volunteers to load supplies and water at the staging area. Everyone else stay on the bus! These stirring words rouse the napping workers from their reverie as the large charter bus winds its way through Pensacola Beach. Jen Superdock, a diminutive pony-tailed young woman in a white hard hat gazes impassively through wraparound sunglasses at her charges from the front of the bus; 40 men and women of various backgrounds, ages and ethnicities, now identically garbed as an informal army in reflective vests, safety glasses and work boots. The usual hands go up, and she is pleased and nods the affirmative. The staging area, a commandeered parking area just past the last concrete massive of condos is guarded by a lone deputy in his car. He backs up slowly to let the bus pass. The volunteers charge off the bus and begin to load cases of bottled water, Gatorade, ice, plastic rolls, shovels, rakes and other implements of reconstruction. One by one the foremen report to Jen their shortages and missing items. They re out of latex gloves, and will only give us 12 pairs of Nitrile, those heavy black rubber ones. They only gave us one roll of duct tape. Out flips the Blackberry, and Jen has a short conversation with an invisible party. Back on the bus! Lou-Lou will bring us the rest on the
beach. The bus eases out of the staging area and heads back to the other end of the island, where large amounts of oil have been reported. The night crews work from 5pm until 6am, thirteen hour shifts seven days a week. The crews are ravaged by exhaustion and sickness, but the lure of steady work and over forty hours of overtime keeps them on the job even if they re sick. All have taken the 40 hour HAZWOPER (Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response) training required by OSHA, and all have been through BP s training as well. The HAZWOPER training addresses working in chemical suits and respirators, and the safety protocols of chemical decontamination. All have taken drug tests and physicals, and supposedly
passed background checks. The crews work until they drop. The only way to get a day off is a doctor s note or to fall out with heat exhaustion on the beach. The bus glides to a stop in front of Casino Beach, and disgorges its contents of fluorescent workers and supplies. Foremen stand at the exit, and bark Safety glasses on! Everyone knows their team. Assemble by your team s supplies and stand by . We all grab something from the mountainous pile, and begin our long trek up the beach. Immediately after the Deepwater Horizon blew up and sank, BP began to mobilize cleanup contractors. Ads promising high pay for workers popped up seemingly everywhere. As a grad student I needed a summer job, and helping to clean up a threat to Florida s beaches seemed appropriate and noble. I scanned Craigslist job offerings in the locations affected by the spill, and determined that the qualifications required were a 40 hour hazardous materials handling class called HAZWOPER, and a strong back. I had the advantage of being able to pay for the course and take it online, completing it in a few days. I was ready! I persistently applied to every prospective employer with my resume, and heard nothing for days. What was I doing wrong? My local veteran s services rep suggested rewriting my resume, paring it down to the minimum. I eliminated all traces of middle age, and talked up my supervisory experience. Most of the local ads seeking oil spill workers were just making a list in case of a deluge of oil on the local beaches. I responded to ads in Tampa, Panama City, Pensacola, Mobile and New Orleans, and even drove to a job fair in Panama City hosted by the Parsons Corporation, lured by promises of $25 per hour for boom deployment work. Alas, I was over-educated and a graybeard; Parsons wanted deckhand experience and youth and I had neither. Upon my dejected return to Pinellas, I received a promising email from a labor contractor in response to an ad I answered on Craigslist. I was instructed to apply online and send
a copy of my HAZWOPER certification, and he could have me working right away. I sent my new resume, as well. Hours later, I received an interview appointment for the following Monday with the Tallahassee firm Eisman and Russo Consulting Engineers, at their office in Pensacola. Sunday night, the contractor called me and told me to stand down; there was some sort of unexplained insurance hitch regarding the crews on the beach. I was not to be deterred. I loaded my clothes and work boots in my trusty sedan and headed up US 19 to Pensacola. Upon my arrival, I rented a room at America s Best Motel; the parking lot was full of white pickups with license plates from Louisiana and Texas. The next morning I drove to the office in pouring rain, an old used car lot on West Navy Boulevard. There were at least two contractors sharing this office, and Eisman and Russo were not hiring that day. RCI from of Slidell, Louisiana was hiring, and after a brief interview and mountains of application paperwork I was hired to supervise a crew of 10 -15 cleanup workers at the rate of $15 per hour and $75 a day for expenses. I was ecstatic! Most of the workers make between $10 and $12 per hour. The job hours were daunting. Crews were working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day not including the additional hour to clock in and receive your job assignment. I greedily added up the overtime, and dismissed the long hours. I drove to Orange Beach, Alabama later that day for BP s training, an hour of lecture specific to the hazards of spilled oil. BP printed our ID cards on the spot, and I was ready to start work that very night. I am a foreman, and far older than most of these kids; no way are they going to beat me to the jobsite. I set a brisk pace with a case of water on my shoulder and my clipboard in my other hand. The straggly line of fluorescent vests trudge nearly a mile down the beach; fighting deep sand and struggling with equipment. I arrive winded and heart pounding at the jobsite, and instruct one half of our team to set up camp, while the other half suits up in PPE, or Personal Protective Equipment. Although we are working the night shift, we are required to set up a canopy in the rest area of camp. The workers quickly
lay out plastic sheeting to define the decontamination zone, and set up our two folding chairs to assist with donning the PPE. It s still hot, and sweat runs down our faces as we struggle into yellow rubber booties called chickenfeet , and Tyvek coveralls. A pair of latex gloves followed by heavy black Nitrile gloves adds to the ensemble. I hand out red LED headlights, checking off names on my clipboard. Our coolers have not arrived, so water and Gatorade bottles swim in big plastic bags filled with ice. Team Two, headout! Ten rubber and plastic encased workers head to the tideline, and begin to rake tar balls and oily seaweed into piles. They work in groups of two or three, raking and shoveling tar and sand into plastic bags. Ten to Fifteen pounds in those bags! Jen has arrived on the scene and admonishes the crew. That s two shovelfuls! The working team transfers the bags to the decontamination area, and
a few workers begin to spin them and tape them closed. The bags of decon will be double-bagged and duct-taped shut before beginning their journey to wherever it is they eventually wind up. It s rumored they are going to landfills, a troubling thought. Thirty minutes later, Team One heads to the tideline and Team Two surrenders their tools and trudges back up to the decon area. The teams work thirty minutes, and rest thirty. Rest is a strange term, since they must either remove all of their PPE to go into the canopy area with coolers of cold drinks, or remain in the decon area, sprawled out in the sand. To remove the PPE required at least 10 minutes, and expenditure of energy; most choose to stay in the sand. As a foreman, I accept the duty of cocktail waitress dispensing cold water and Gatorade to all. Twenty minutes later, I advise them to get ready to go back out, and the transition starts to flow smoothly. It s a bit like cleaning the world s largest cat-box. The pile of decon bags is starting to grow. By 9:30PM it s dark, and the red headlamps of the crews look like bright red fireflies bobbing and weaving on the tideline. Red light doesn t scare turtles, which are reputedly making their way to the beach to lay eggs. We are assured of this by our Turtle Lady, a charming woman of advanced years who prowls the beach all night for the Fish and Wildlife Service. She hasn t seen a turtle yet, but she s
ready to assist; a well-meaning soul, I ask How do they remove oil from turtle eggs? she ponders this and has no answer. The full moon rises, and a column of yellow light skips across the waves. By midnight the haze from evaporation is blotting out the horizon as a miasmatic fog settles in and the humidity skyrockets. The crews work slower now, and lunch is the topic for conversation. Tonight lunch is late, and our box lunches from Subway won t be at the bus until two a.m. By one, we have our first casualty. One worker has been sleeping on his break; actually falling off the cooler he was sitting on twice. He leans on his shovel and dozes, while his team works around him. I repeatedly have to wake him up to go back to work, and draw Jen s attention to him. She advises me to keep an watchful eye on him, and that LouLou will terminate him in the morning. Other workers that become slothful are not so fortunate, and five more will be sent back to the bus mid-shift the next night. With thousands of applicants, there s no room for the sick or the slow. Two in the morning, and we start sending the first crew back for lunch at the bus. They get twenty minutes to gobble a bland Subway sandwich of unknown provenance, and a forty minute round trip means the next crew doesn t head back to the bus to eat until around 3. The pile of Decon bags is huge, and the returning crew is set to double bagging. The fireflies resume their Kokopelli-like dance, and the moon begins to set in the west. Conversation turns to more personal issues, and a steady stream of fireflies trickle back and forth to the porta-potties, some 1500 yards distant. OSHA requires us to walk in twos at night on the beach. I get to know something of my crew: My most dedicated workers are Larry, a gregarious and successful Pensacola charter fishing boat captain who is trying to stop this insidious evil from ruining his livelihood by single-handedly cleaning the entire beach, and Scott, an easygoing construction crane owner and operator from Las Vegas who although independently wealthy has altruistic motives. His daughter is a
marine biologist, and he is trying to make his little girl happy. Unlike the rest of us newcomers, he sports a battered red hardhat with stickers from jobs all over the world. His visage reminds me of Richard Boone, the surly actor of Paladin fame. I have in my charge a gregarious boyfriend-girlfriend team of twenty-somethings from Pensacola, a few young men and women from the more desperate neighborhoods, and a young female student from Alaska, working on her degree at the local university. All but two are from Florida. No one here has ever worked an oil spill before, and our management team with the exception of Lou-Lou has just a few days more experience than the newest worker. Lou-Lou has the hesitant spryness and wiry toughness of a man who has worked hard all of his life, and has been in the oil business for decades. We see him little, but keep a wary eye for his Gator , a small fourwheel drive utility vehicle suitable for sand. The other foreman has been on the job just a few days longer than me. Charles confides that it s not rocket science, and that I should have a good grasp by my third night. He s right. Four-thirty, and we start to wind it up for the night. Everyone is exhausted from the heat and humidity, the constant slogging though deep sand. Our pile of bags has grown to 845, and we pitch them onto the back of Lou-Lou s Gator. He makes several trips to the parking lot where these bags are loaded onto a trailer for transport. We strike our camp, and struggle back up the beach to the bus with our equipment. It seems there s more gear than when we started out, how is that possible? The exhausted fireflies slowly shuffle though the sand, carrying our tools and surplus water. As they board the bus, I collect the headlamps and check them off the list. The sleepy worker has his BP badge pulled by Charles, and the big man loudly protests that he s the hardest working member of the crew. Turns out he s very sick, sleeping in his car and the rumor is that he s just finished a ten year stretch in Angola Prison for killing a supervisor in a rage. Charles is understandably more than a trifle nervous about having to fire the man and then ride on a bus with him for an hour. We foremen keep a watchful eye on him, and I m silently thankful this task fell to Charles and not to me.
As we set off for the staging area to unload, conversation drops to a murmur; snores permeate the air and workers who probably don t know each other s names democratically rest their heads on each other in slumber. A pungent odor permeates the bus, an acrid combination of overflowing bus toilet and perspiration. The gear is unloaded by the same who loaded it, and the bus turns for the Port. The crew sleeps soundly. As we pull l through the gates, sullenly stirring workers are reminded by Jen that if they leave the bus dirty, we will all collectively be fired. A large trash bag circulates fore and aft, and the fireflies slowly disembark. A U-Haul truck sits by the security shed, a man hands out Styrofoam boxes of breakfast, a fine and tasty contribution of Cracker Barrel. I find my two riders, a couple of homeless fellows that are sleeping in the woods behind a car wash off of Pace Avenue until payday. We talk about our evening as we ride out, and go our separate ways. I arrive at my motel about 7:30AM, and cannot sleep. I m just too tired and too numb. In just a few hours, I will be back at the Port, waiting to board the bus and do it all again. I feel vindicated that I have made a small, personal effort to preserve my Florida; so many make excuses and wistfully cite the futility or politics of the project. I have seen the oil and fought it on the beaches, as my ancestors fought America s enemies on beaches in more deadly and desperate battles. The tar balls and mats will continue to wash ashore for years after I have returned to my studies, and I admire and value the efforts of all those like Jen, Lou-Lou and Captain Larry who doggedly labor to keep the weathered crude from our doorstep, and to protect our Florida environment and way of life. BIO Christopher Klug is a USFSP graduate student, seeking an advanced degree in Florida Studies. Returning to his home State after a brief residency in Alabama, he has made Florida s drinking water and environmental issues the focus of his studies. He is married to Mary Klug, and resides in St. Petersburg.
I need five volunteers to load supplies and water at the staging area. Everyone else stay on the bus! These stirring words rouse the napping workers from their reverie as the large charter bus winds its way through Pensacola Beach. Jen Superdock, a diminutive pony-tailed young woman in a white hard hat gazes impassively through wraparound sunglasses at her charges from the front of the bus; 40 men and women of various backgrounds, ages and ethnicities, now identically garbed as an informal army in reflective vests, safety glasses and work boots. The usual hands go up, and she is pleased and nods the affirmative. The staging area, a commandeered parking area just past the last concrete massive of condos is guarded by a lone deputy in his car. He backs up slowly to let the bus pass. The volunteers charge off the bus and begin to load cases of bottled water, Gatorade, ice, plastic rolls, shovels, rakes and other implements of reconstruction. One by one the foremen report to Jen their shortages and missing items. They re out of latex gloves, and will only give us 12 pairs of Nitrile, those heavy black rubber ones. They only gave us one roll of duct tape. Out flips the Blackberry, and Jen has a short conversation with an invisible party. Back on the bus! Lou-Lou will bring us the rest on the
beach. The bus eases out of the staging area and heads back to the other end of the island, where large amounts of oil have been reported. The night crews work from 5pm until 6am, thirteen hour shifts seven days a week. The crews are ravaged by exhaustion and sickness, but the lure of steady work and over forty hours of overtime keeps them on the job even if they re sick. All have taken the 40 hour HAZWOPER (Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response) training required by OSHA, and all have been through BP s training as well. The HAZWOPER training addresses working in chemical suits and respirators, and the safety protocols of chemical decontamination. All have taken drug tests and physicals, and supposedly
passed background checks. The crews work until they drop. The only way to get a day off is a doctor s note or to fall out with heat exhaustion on the beach. The bus glides to a stop in front of Casino Beach, and disgorges its contents of fluorescent workers and supplies. Foremen stand at the exit, and bark Safety glasses on! Everyone knows their team. Assemble by your team s supplies and stand by . We all grab something from the mountainous pile, and begin our long trek up the beach. Immediately after the Deepwater Horizon blew up and sank, BP began to mobilize cleanup contractors. Ads promising high pay for workers popped up seemingly everywhere. As a grad student I needed a summer job, and helping to clean up a threat to Florida s beaches seemed appropriate and noble. I scanned Craigslist job offerings in the locations affected by the spill, and determined that the qualifications required were a 40 hour hazardous materials handling class called HAZWOPER, and a strong back. I had the advantage of being able to pay for the course and take it online, completing it in a few days. I was ready! I persistently applied to every prospective employer with my resume, and heard nothing for days. What was I doing wrong? My local veteran s services rep suggested rewriting my resume, paring it down to the minimum. I eliminated all traces of middle age, and talked up my supervisory experience. Most of the local ads seeking oil spill workers were just making a list in case of a deluge of oil on the local beaches. I responded to ads in Tampa, Panama City, Pensacola, Mobile and New Orleans, and even drove to a job fair in Panama City hosted by the Parsons Corporation, lured by promises of $25 per hour for boom deployment work. Alas, I was over-educated and a graybeard; Parsons wanted deckhand experience and youth and I had neither. Upon my dejected return to Pinellas, I received a promising email from a labor contractor in response to an ad I answered on Craigslist. I was instructed to apply online and send
a copy of my HAZWOPER certification, and he could have me working right away. I sent my new resume, as well. Hours later, I received an interview appointment for the following Monday with the Tallahassee firm Eisman and Russo Consulting Engineers, at their office in Pensacola. Sunday night, the contractor called me and told me to stand down; there was some sort of unexplained insurance hitch regarding the crews on the beach. I was not to be deterred. I loaded my clothes and work boots in my trusty sedan and headed up US 19 to Pensacola. Upon my arrival, I rented a room at America s Best Motel; the parking lot was full of white pickups with license plates from Louisiana and Texas. The next morning I drove to the office in pouring rain, an old used car lot on West Navy Boulevard. There were at least two contractors sharing this office, and Eisman and Russo were not hiring that day. RCI from of Slidell, Louisiana was hiring, and after a brief interview and mountains of application paperwork I was hired to supervise a crew of 10 -15 cleanup workers at the rate of $15 per hour and $75 a day for expenses. I was ecstatic! Most of the workers make between $10 and $12 per hour. The job hours were daunting. Crews were working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day not including the additional hour to clock in and receive your job assignment. I greedily added up the overtime, and dismissed the long hours. I drove to Orange Beach, Alabama later that day for BP s training, an hour of lecture specific to the hazards of spilled oil. BP printed our ID cards on the spot, and I was ready to start work that very night. I am a foreman, and far older than most of these kids; no way are they going to beat me to the jobsite. I set a brisk pace with a case of water on my shoulder and my clipboard in my other hand. The straggly line of fluorescent vests trudge nearly a mile down the beach; fighting deep sand and struggling with equipment. I arrive winded and heart pounding at the jobsite, and instruct one half of our team to set up camp, while the other half suits up in PPE, or Personal Protective Equipment. Although we are working the night shift, we are required to set up a canopy in the rest area of camp. The workers quickly
lay out plastic sheeting to define the decontamination zone, and set up our two folding chairs to assist with donning the PPE. It s still hot, and sweat runs down our faces as we struggle into yellow rubber booties called chickenfeet , and Tyvek coveralls. A pair of latex gloves followed by heavy black Nitrile gloves adds to the ensemble. I hand out red LED headlights, checking off names on my clipboard. Our coolers have not arrived, so water and Gatorade bottles swim in big plastic bags filled with ice. Team Two, headout! Ten rubber and plastic encased workers head to the tideline, and begin to rake tar balls and oily seaweed into piles. They work in groups of two or three, raking and shoveling tar and sand into plastic bags. Ten to Fifteen pounds in those bags! Jen has arrived on the scene and admonishes the crew. That s two shovelfuls! The working team transfers the bags to the decontamination area, and
a few workers begin to spin them and tape them closed. The bags of decon will be double-bagged and duct-taped shut before beginning their journey to wherever it is they eventually wind up. It s rumored they are going to landfills, a troubling thought. Thirty minutes later, Team One heads to the tideline and Team Two surrenders their tools and trudges back up to the decon area. The teams work thirty minutes, and rest thirty. Rest is a strange term, since they must either remove all of their PPE to go into the canopy area with coolers of cold drinks, or remain in the decon area, sprawled out in the sand. To remove the PPE required at least 10 minutes, and expenditure of energy; most choose to stay in the sand. As a foreman, I accept the duty of cocktail waitress dispensing cold water and Gatorade to all. Twenty minutes later, I advise them to get ready to go back out, and the transition starts to flow smoothly. It s a bit like cleaning the world s largest cat-box. The pile of decon bags is starting to grow. By 9:30PM it s dark, and the red headlamps of the crews look like bright red fireflies bobbing and weaving on the tideline. Red light doesn t scare turtles, which are reputedly making their way to the beach to lay eggs. We are assured of this by our Turtle Lady, a charming woman of advanced years who prowls the beach all night for the Fish and Wildlife Service. She hasn t seen a turtle yet, but she s
ready to assist; a well-meaning soul, I ask How do they remove oil from turtle eggs? she ponders this and has no answer. The full moon rises, and a column of yellow light skips across the waves. By midnight the haze from evaporation is blotting out the horizon as a miasmatic fog settles in and the humidity skyrockets. The crews work slower now, and lunch is the topic for conversation. Tonight lunch is late, and our box lunches from Subway won t be at the bus until two a.m. By one, we have our first casualty. One worker has been sleeping on his break; actually falling off the cooler he was sitting on twice. He leans on his shovel and dozes, while his team works around him. I repeatedly have to wake him up to go back to work, and draw Jen s attention to him. She advises me to keep an watchful eye on him, and that LouLou will terminate him in the morning. Other workers that become slothful are not so fortunate, and five more will be sent back to the bus mid-shift the next night. With thousands of applicants, there s no room for the sick or the slow. Two in the morning, and we start sending the first crew back for lunch at the bus. They get twenty minutes to gobble a bland Subway sandwich of unknown provenance, and a forty minute round trip means the next crew doesn t head back to the bus to eat until around 3. The pile of Decon bags is huge, and the returning crew is set to double bagging. The fireflies resume their Kokopelli-like dance, and the moon begins to set in the west. Conversation turns to more personal issues, and a steady stream of fireflies trickle back and forth to the porta-potties, some 1500 yards distant. OSHA requires us to walk in twos at night on the beach. I get to know something of my crew: My most dedicated workers are Larry, a gregarious and successful Pensacola charter fishing boat captain who is trying to stop this insidious evil from ruining his livelihood by single-handedly cleaning the entire beach, and Scott, an easygoing construction crane owner and operator from Las Vegas who although independently wealthy has altruistic motives. His daughter is a
marine biologist, and he is trying to make his little girl happy. Unlike the rest of us newcomers, he sports a battered red hardhat with stickers from jobs all over the world. His visage reminds me of Richard Boone, the surly actor of Paladin fame. I have in my charge a gregarious boyfriend-girlfriend team of twenty-somethings from Pensacola, a few young men and women from the more desperate neighborhoods, and a young female student from Alaska, working on her degree at the local university. All but two are from Florida. No one here has ever worked an oil spill before, and our management team with the exception of Lou-Lou has just a few days more experience than the newest worker. Lou-Lou has the hesitant spryness and wiry toughness of a man who has worked hard all of his life, and has been in the oil business for decades. We see him little, but keep a wary eye for his Gator , a small fourwheel drive utility vehicle suitable for sand. The other foreman has been on the job just a few days longer than me. Charles confides that it s not rocket science, and that I should have a good grasp by my third night. He s right. Four-thirty, and we start to wind it up for the night. Everyone is exhausted from the heat and humidity, the constant slogging though deep sand. Our pile of bags has grown to 845, and we pitch them onto the back of Lou-Lou s Gator. He makes several trips to the parking lot where these bags are loaded onto a trailer for transport. We strike our camp, and struggle back up the beach to the bus with our equipment. It seems there s more gear than when we started out, how is that possible? The exhausted fireflies slowly shuffle though the sand, carrying our tools and surplus water. As they board the bus, I collect the headlamps and check them off the list. The sleepy worker has his BP badge pulled by Charles, and the big man loudly protests that he s the hardest working member of the crew. Turns out he s very sick, sleeping in his car and the rumor is that he s just finished a ten year stretch in Angola Prison for killing a supervisor in a rage. Charles is understandably more than a trifle nervous about having to fire the man and then ride on a bus with him for an hour. We foremen keep a watchful eye on him, and I m silently thankful this task fell to Charles and not to me.
As we set off for the staging area to unload, conversation drops to a murmur; snores permeate the air and workers who probably don t know each other s names democratically rest their heads on each other in slumber. A pungent odor permeates the bus, an acrid combination of overflowing bus toilet and perspiration. The gear is unloaded by the same who loaded it, and the bus turns for the Port. The crew sleeps soundly. As we pull l through the gates, sullenly stirring workers are reminded by Jen that if they leave the bus dirty, we will all collectively be fired. A large trash bag circulates fore and aft, and the fireflies slowly disembark. A U-Haul truck sits by the security shed, a man hands out Styrofoam boxes of breakfast, a fine and tasty contribution of Cracker Barrel. I find my two riders, a couple of homeless fellows that are sleeping in the woods behind a car wash off of Pace Avenue until payday. We talk about our evening as we ride out, and go our separate ways. I arrive at my motel about 7:30AM, and cannot sleep. I m just too tired and too numb. In just a few hours, I will be back at the Port, waiting to board the bus and do it all again. I feel vindicated that I have made a small, personal effort to preserve my Florida; so many make excuses and wistfully cite the futility or politics of the project. I have seen the oil and fought it on the beaches, as my ancestors fought America s enemies on beaches in more deadly and desperate battles. The tar balls and mats will continue to wash ashore for years after I have returned to my studies, and I admire and value the efforts of all those like Jen, Lou-Lou and Captain Larry who doggedly labor to keep the weathered crude from our doorstep, and to protect our Florida environment and way of life. BIO Christopher Klug is a USFSP graduate student, seeking an advanced degree in Florida Studies. Returning to his home State after a brief residency in Alabama, he has made Florida s drinking water and environmental issues the focus of his studies. He is married to Mary Klug, and resides in St. Petersburg.
