Lorrie Williams and Bud Waltman live a few blocks away from where they once worked from a boat, trapping crabs off a marshy beach in Ocean Springs, Miss.
With BP’s oil spill officially under control, and crabbing waters reopened, the mom-and-pop crabbers could go back to their work, but they won’t.
“We talk about going back to crabbing,” Williams says, holding back tears, “but our conscience won’t let us do it. Because I don’t believe the seafood is safe.”
One day BP’s oil spill was the worst environmental disaster in American history. The next, it was mostly just gone.
Most of the oil, the official reports say, was cleaned up. Some of it, though, was sunk thousands of feet below the sea using millions of gallons of chemical dispersants.
What happens to this toxic, undersea soup over time? Williams and Waltman believe it is already washing up on their beach.
“It’s this thick nasty, bubbling-looking, rainbow-colored mess, and it’s all over the beach,” Williams tells me. “The marsh grass is dying like crazy.”
They take me to an unfrequented beach that is grassy, marshy and silted with Mississippi mud.
It is littered, here and there, with pieces of polystyrene oil containment boom that once protected this shore. Splotches and rivulets of milky, multi-colored chemicals linger on the surfaces of tide pools and a bayou. Wide swaths of dead marsh grass have been reduced to blackened stubs.
I do not know with any certainty what this stuff is, but it does not look like it should be there, naturally. All I can do, for now, is point to conflicting reports.
The Mississippi Department of Marine Resources has said that no oil has been documented in federal waters from its shores since July 12, and only scattered light sheens since July 29.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently analyzed shrimp and finfish samples from the area and said it found oil and dispersant well below levels of concern.
But then there’s this report from Boston Chemical Data Corp.
New Orleans law firm Stag Smith LLC hired the private testing company to take samples along the Gulf Coast as it prepares lawsuits against BP. Boston Chemical recently reported that it found high concentrations of dispersant between Biloxi and Horn Island.
It may be difficult for crabbers to know who to trust — the state, the feds, or a trial lawyer. They said they’ve complained to authorities only to be told the white, filmy substance they see everywhere is some kind of deteriorating plant matter. But Williams and Waltman rely on their own observations.
“Every time the ocean is stirred up, it will come to the top,” Waltman, said of the deep-sea dispersant stew.
At 46, Waltman has walked this beach and fished from its shores all his life.
“My first day on the shrimp boat, I was 6 years old, with my uncle,” he said. I’ve been a commercial fisherman all my life: “fishin’, crabbin’ oysterin’.. And I ain’t seen nothin’ like this.”
“Sometimes you can smell it in the air,” said Williams. “It smells like muriatic acid and burned power steering fluid.”
“Every time you get a southern wind blowing, we can smell it at the house,” Waltman added.
Lately, the couple have been worried about their health after their 10-year-old son took a bike ride to the beach.
“He was only there for 10 minutes, and when he got home, he was complaining that his throat was burning,” Williams said.
Eventually, all their throats started burning, and then came persistent coughing and sniffling. A doctor told them it might just be allergies, or asthma, or just about anything but emulsified oil and chemical dispersants.
They only thing they know for sure is that they don’t want to sell crabs to Maryland, West Virginia and the other parts of the country were their catches go.
Said Williams: “If we were to sell crabs and then hear people started getting sick…from crabs, I would swear it was our crabs.”
Al Lewis: al.lewis@dowjones.com, 212-416-2617 or
