Diagnosis: Merger

Dedicated readers,

Since I'm no longer flying solo, I'm writing on a different blog with my new copilot. Check out Mergers + Acquisitions to read the adventures of a young couple in New Orleans and in love. We're having twice the fun!

M and A

Carl III

"As that saying goes, 'If you don't like the weather in southeast Louisiana, just wait a day or so because it will change,'" says Carl Arredondo. When I check the radar images for New Orleans and the surrounding areas, the serene face of this Chief Meteorologist assures me that, rain or shine, he will contrive beforehand which it will be. WWLTV has an interesting write-up about this man, which I recommend.

Some of you know that meteorology has always entirely escaped me, thus my hat is off to this master of the winds.

Soon, It's Personal

I'm worrying more than most about the tropical depression moving toward the Yucatan tonight. Hopefully it will get tired over land and only bring light, cooling showers to the Gulf of Mexico, instead of picking up speed, scattering the fleet, and driving twenty-foot waves of suffocating brown sludge over the fragile coast, spilling the Gulf's spill into towns and fields in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. That is a big enough worry, to be sure.

But it might all be done in my name. The National Hurricane Center, like an eager parent, has the name of the first hurricane of 2010 picked out and ready to go: Alex.

Maybe a more apt comparison would be to the first bullet in the gun. BP doesn't expect to stop making its mess before August, during which two full months of hurricane season (supposed to be a busy one this year) shall pass. There are hurricanes in the Gulf every year. The gun will fire. I just wish the first bullet wasn't signed by me.

That old trope, about a far-away butterfly beating its wings, comes to mind. The NHC has had its names lined up for years. And this tropical storm is not the product of one lost butterfly, but a pattern of weather that has been unbroken since shortly after the ice age. But this goddamn mess--when did the air first stir that brought us this disaster in April?

Maps of Disaster

See the blot grow in this Times-Picayune graphic.

See a live-updated map (created by Tulane students) of reports of oil sightings.

"This is nauseating."

I read the latest on where the oil is coming ashore, and scrolled through the comments made (primarily) by locals. Some simply vent their anger at BP, some suggest proper retribution for their mistakes, some complain about the wider problem of an "oil addiction," and some scorn hope out of hopelessness. The latter speak with cynicism, trying their best to make a joke of something of which they are terrified, but their best efforts cannot lighten the long shadow thrown by the news that only gets worse.

The estimate of the size of the spill increases, the solutions that are in place (like chemical dispersants) take harsh criticism, and all the while the oil continues to gush. One of the commenters corrected the name "spill"--"It's an unlimited oil volcano!"--to the approbation of his fellow commenters, but even that small victory of language cannot stop the disaster it so effectively describes.

Underwater, the oil was an unseen disaster. Some knew what it truly entailed--what trouble that ecosystem saw--but while the visible oil floated harmlessly on the surface, far out in the Gulf, the miles of booms and fleets of skimmers and great concrete contrivances seemed noble and maybe even hopeful. The enemy may have been burning the fields, but they had not yet breached the wall. Upon landfall, the tide of opinion has changed. The best efforts at containment now look futile, the fleets pitiful, the booms flimsy. The war seems lost.

The beginning of the Ode to Man, which starts at line 332 in Sophocles' Antigone, uses the word deinos to describe man, a word which spans two English meanings, both wonderful and terrible, best captured in the idea of "awe." (I have altered David Grene's translation, below, to make use of that instead of "wonder," as he renders it.)

"Many are those things which inspire awe,
none is more awful than man.
This it is that crosses the sea
with the south winds storming and the waves swelling
breaking around him in roaring surf.
He it is who wears away
the Earth, oldest of gods, immortal, unwearied,
as the plows wind across her from year to year
when he works her with the breed that comes from horses..."

The scariest thing about British Petroleum's oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is the way our own powers have turned on us. The finest technology history has ever seen allowed man in his greatest strength to tap the resources of the earth, not just below the soil of fertile fields, but thousands of feet below the sea, where his own meager body could never go alone. What beautiful might! But now, what we opened with our strength we cannot close again, what we created we cannot destroy.

It has been a full month since we lost control of the power we had formerly harnessed. But only when the oil washed ashore on the mainland, did the wonderful become terrible.

Well,

It's here. And although it's been wreaking unseen havoc beneath the brown surface of the Gulf (which is an extension of that part of the world that can feel very distant to us land-dwellers), the story really gets depressing now. This is pretty much what that story will be until a miracle occurs:

"Everything that that blanket of oil is covering today will die," he said. "All of the bugs that the fish come in to eat, all of the critters in the marsh will die. And that marsh will die. There's no way to clean it up."

They're Lifting the Box Now

Thursday night: The AP has a man on board the ship carrying the "containment box" for the oil leak, who reports that, despite delays on Thursday night due to rising fumes in the hot, windless evening, the work of lowering it has gotten underway.

I spoke to my friendly fisherman landlord today about the "unprecedented mess," as he called it. He told me they shut down both sides of the river to fishing traffic today, to avoid contaminated catches, etc. Only a small percentage of the boats and crews that volunteered to help with the cleanup have been asked to help, he said, by BP or whoever is handling the situation (in name only, since no one is handling the situation), so I wonder what the banks of the gulf and delta thoroughfares look like today, lined with men helplessly searching the horizon for the creeping stain whose march they cannot stop.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting a few blocks north of the river in my stifling room, reading the latest news on the oil. It's like watching a bomb explode really, really slowly.

My landlord also said he declined to volunteer, partly because of what had been told him about the excess of volunteers, and partly because he heard that the particular crude filling the gulf can penetrate fiberglass, which forms the hull of his own vessel. It wouldn't cause it to sink, but it would leave a permanent red stain. I wonder, though, if the small craft helping to lay the booms in the path of the oily devil will wear red stains for years to come as marks of suffering and experience.

We talked more than just oil, though. He also mentioned that he has a daughter in Nashville, where she and everyone else is appalled at the lack of coverage, in favor of the Gulf Coast emergency and the Times Square bomber. If you haven't, read something about that other mess. Here's the saddest piece I've read about it.

I hope the box drops successfully. If it tears a bigger hole in the pipe, I'll be awfully sad.