14 April: Crawfish Kickoff

What better way to kick off this project then with a crawfish boil - a quintessential of Louisiana food culture! My friend Trish Kelly offered to host the event at her house in the Bywater neighborhood of downtown New Orleans. Artist and North Shore native, Tommy Hebert, agreed to man the boil. The soiree that would serve as the inauguration to our film took place just one week before anniversary day, on a fortuitously warm and sunny Saturday afternoon. While our friends were busy sucking heads and downing beers we set up a filming station on the back porch of Trish’s old Creole cottage and, one by one, we pulled our friends aside and asked them to relate their experiences living through the BP Oil Spill. The following is just a selection of what a couple of them had to say.

Carrie Crockett, writer and Humane Society Volunteer, recalls that she was with a boyfriend enjoying a warm spring day at a Biloxi beach when she overheard some beach-goers talking about an explosion in the gulf. By the time she returned to her home in New Orleans, it had become evident that what had transpired in the Gulf was to be a disaster of epic proportion. Carrie felt an urgency that compelled her to return to the beach for a final adieu before oil desecrated Gulf shores.  As she waded into Perdido Bay, Carrie was horrified to see a noxious slick in the foam and spray of the tide at her feet and hasn’t set foot in the Gulf since. “I get a sore throat everytime I go and I know it’s not safe... I don’t eat the fish when I’m there and I don’t go in the water anymore. I don’t think I’ll be comfortable for the rest of my life in the Gulf of Mexico”.

A longtime volunteer of the Humane Society, Carrie was one of its first responders to survey the damage to the Gulf Shore ecosystem. Upon arriving to Grand Isle with the intention of rescuing contaminated wildlife, Carrie was frustrated with the amount of red tape she encountered: “They would not let us help. The human society, that’s what we do.” Officials already on the ground had the entire area quarantined and only BP-contracted professionals with previous HAZMAT certification were allowed access; although Carrie concedes, “They did allow us to survey the area in a boat.” The situation was dire, but what she most laments is the inadequacy of the supposed clean-up effort: “There was supposed to be all these people cleaning up. We circled around 3 hours and we saw one boat. BP was not letting people help. A lot of people came to help and all I could do was organize a prayer service. No one was cleaning, no one was doing anything. The beach was quarantined and if you crossed the restricted area you would be arrested.” Finally, after much doggedness, The Humane Society was  allowed a staging area for civilians to deliver birds and other contaminated wildlife, before transport to a designated cleaning facility coordinated by BP and its affiliates.

Now two years later, Carrie scorns the short-term memory of a public that has already forgotten the Spill. “I think it left the news and public consciousness so quickly because the Gulf Coast and particularly Florida wanted it to. The tourism industry wanted it to.” In contrast, Carrie insists that we are reminded daily of Hurricane Katrina. Carrie, a long-time advocate for the rights and welfare of animals, is prostrate at a value-system, in which other species hold such low ranking.

Dan Favre, a conservationist with the Gulf Restoration Network (GRN), provided us with a brief history of coastal erosion and how the Oil Spill affected this already crippled ecosystem. We asked him his initial reaction to this great tragedy. “I don’t remember exactly the moment I learned that the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded... but I do remember wanting to deny the importance of the thing. I’m an environmentalist. I’ve worked for a lot of years to protect and restore the Gulf of Mexico. And so, it took a little while for the idea that one of the biggest assaults to this ecosystem is happening right now.”

At the time of the Oil Spill, Dan was in the midst of putting together a door-to-door campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of an ever receding coastline. He emphasises the point that coastal erosion is the most pressing issue, trumping even oil contamination in terms of primacy. “We lose a football field's worth of wetlands every hour due to coastal erosion,” Dan interjects in a discourse on the mechanics of the region’s delicate ecosystem. Here’s an adumbrated version of what Dan had to say: The Mississippi River carries with it an enormous amount of sediment, which, in its annual overflow, is what built the delta, including the ground on which our cities and towns have been built. In order to prevent the consequent deluge of these inhabited areas, as well as to ensure that commercial trade can run unabated, the river has been corralled off by a system of levees and dams. However, without the river’s regenerative deposits, the land is sinking. Moreover, the oil and gas industry has contributed to the destruction of surrounding wetlands by dredging canals, in which to lay pipeline. Tens of thousands of miles of artificial canals have subsequently led to saltwater intrusion and increased wave action. The result is that the wetlands and barrier islands, which provide inhabited areas with a buffer-zone from Gulf-spawned hurricanes, are rapidly disappearing. Without this buffer, our cities and towns become increasingly more vulnerable to storms, such as the likes of Katrina. “It’s really caused this catastrophic loss; this is the fastest disappearing landmass on earth,” Dan remonstrates. And now, the oil spill has added a new level of urgency, threatening a unique habitat that not only protects our cities from storms, but literally feeds us -- the Gulf Coast provides for roughly one third of the entire domestic seafood industry.

The GRN ultimately decided to shift the focus of their campaign. Dan recalls the meeting when this conversion took place. Just days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, The GRN hired a plane in order to survey and document the disaster. Dan was shocked by what he saw. Perhaps more shocking than the raw impact of so much oil was the fact that no one was doing anything: “There was an oil slick for as far as the eye could see. There were like two boats that are working to skim or do something, you’re not really sure. You got BP and the coastguard meanwhile are saying, ‘we’re mobilizing all sorts of resources - we’ll take care of this. Don’t worry. Nothing to see here - talking about the dozens of boats and all of these planes that are doing all this work, but when you go out and actually look to see it - that just wasn’t actually happening.” It was the discrepancy between official reports and what was actually happening on the ground that spurred the GRN into action. Dan is part of the team that continues to prove instrumental in monitoring both the effects of the Oil Spill and the recovery effort, as well as lobbying the government for effective legislation.

Now two years later, Dan insists that the struggle is far from over. The GRN remains hard at work and much of their resources are focused on congress, who have yet to pass a single piece of legislation to address the BP Oil Spill and restoration resources. “We’ve already had this huge wetlands loss issue and there’s a lot of ideas about how to fix that. We can put the Mississippi River back to work, build these diversions that put dirt and water out into the wetlands areas, go fill in some of those canals that were dredged in the past -- it takes a lot of resources, it takes political will. Unfortunately those resources have been short in coming, but all of sudden here is this opportunity.” Dan is referring to the Clean Water Act , underwhich BP is going to have to pay between 5 and 20 billion dollars in fines. Under the current legislation however, that money will go directly into the coffers of the U.S. treasury. The GRN is working hard on pressuring Congress to pass legislation, which would ensure that a sizable portion of that money is earmarked for Gulf restoration.

...

Since the time of this interview, Congress has effectively passed the RESTORE Act, which will dedicate a significant portion of BP’s Clean Water Act fines to Gulf restoration. This has been possible thanks to groups like the GRN and an enormous amount of community support. Dan and the GRN will continue to work to watchdog the process and ensure that the money is spent responsibly and efficiently. Given the inherent corruption that is unfortunately an intrinsic part of our political system, the general public must remain proactive to ensure that funds are used properly. Please log on to http://healthygulf.org to see how you can help.

Bike Sketch: "Two Years Too Late" The Movie, Part 1

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1413831950/bp-oil-spill-bike-tour-documentary-two-years-too-l

Two Years Too Late: A tour of Southern Louisiana on the 2nd Anniversary of the BP Oil Spill

Nearly two years ago, on the 20th of April, an explosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killing 11 and resulting in the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. As the gusher flowed unabated for three months, my friends and I, safely in New Orleans, some 130 miles from ground zero, looked on in horror and with a feeling of utter helplessness, as some 5 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. Like a dilating blob out of a sci-fi flick, it spread with a melanizing effervescence, threatening to devour everything within its path - the "dead zone" encompassed an area more than 80 square miles. The science that had enabled the oil industry to drill 5,000 ft below the sea and an additional 18,000 ft below its surface, had proved a pandora's box - tantamount clean up technology has of yet to be developed. Instead, they shot at BP's shadowy monster with likewise monstrous chemical dispersants, over 200,000 gallons of it, causing tentacles of crude oil to moleculize into a scattering of noxious particles that rode the crests of waves toward our shores. Out of sight out of mind seemed to be their intention. However, the well was still leaking and large plumes of crude oil that had escaped the dispersants were discovered far below the ocean's surface. The combined efforts of the coast guard, local parishes and BP to protect our coastlines, employing containment booms, anchor barriers and sand-filled barricades, was nonetheless far too little too late for the enormity of this spill. Our wetland grasses, estuaries, and fishing grounds were left vulnerable. As the tally of poisoned coastline grew, the tourist and fishing industry came to a standstill with no immediate end in sight. The new year came and went and the amount quarantined coast continued to grow despite the supposed capping and drainage of the well. In October, news sources reported that the corpses of dolphins and whales were still washing up on our shores in record numbers. And here we are now, approaching the 2nd anniversary of the BP Oil Spill and everywhere is silence. New Orleans has much returned to "normal". Nobody's talking about it. Everyone's eating seafood from the gulf without the slightest concern. Has the biodiverse ecosystem of Southern Louisiana really recovered or has everyone already forgotten?

We can't remain silent! Last summer I was in Japan working on an illustrated blog about the Nuclear blowout there. My friend Wiley had likewise returned to New Orleans with a newfound passion for making movies. We decided to combine efforts. We would ride our bikes to Southern Louisiana for the second anniversary of the BP Oil Spill. He would make a movie. I'd make my illustrated blog. Together, we'd make sure that no one in our network would forget that the oil spill happened and that above all, it's not over!

Tokyo Goodbye

Coming Soon...

Hiroshima, where past and present converge

Coming soon...

Shikoku

Coming soon...

A Voice in the Wilderness - Conversations with Dr. Koide

Osaka. I crawled out of my sleeping bag and peered over the wall overlooking the castle moat and park, relieved that the sun had risen at last, putting an end to this long chilled night. Picturesque as it may be, it was a mistake camping here on the castle’s ramparts so late in October, unprotected from the weather. Castle Park, which I mentioned in my last post, was the epicenter of Japan's überorganized homeless movement of the 90’s; today however the park appears vacant. A public park is meant to cultivate community, but this one has been left fallow. After all, what is a park without its homeless stewards to make it feel lived-in and not just looked at? What’s left is the kaishain (salarymen) and other somnambulants, shuffling along the demarcated walking paths the way a train follows its tracks. Or perhaps I’m just here at the wrong time. Osaka is one of Japan’s major cultural centers and I’ll have to return to this city one day when I have more time to make a just exploration. Surely behind the polished facade of the urban center there remain pockets of the malcontent. My VISA however is running out and I’ve still got 500 km to Hiroshima.

Today’s destination was the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute (KURRY), which is nestled some 30 km south of Osaka City in the working-class suburbs of Kumatori. It’s here that I hoped to procure an interview with professor Dr. Hiroaki Koide, Japan’s most outspoken critic on the nation’s addiction to nuclear-power. I rode through mostly congested suburbs arriving at the fortified university entrance around lunchtime, vaguely hungry and indubitably intimidated. The campus is vigilantly immured and sentries man the barricaded entrance. Of course I’d failed to contact Dr. Koide ahead of time and I dismayed the improbability that such an important figure would grant an interview sans appointment.

The guards who blocked my entry may have been ignorant of the English language, but the word ‘appointment’ they confidently hurled at me with an interrogative pitch that tripped me up something bad. All I could do was flutter my eyelashes and feign confusion. As the guards phoned the professor, a group of students came to my aid, obviously intrigued by the incongruence of my appearance, a shabby-looking bike tourist in an immaculate institute of nuclear research.  The guards miraculously acquiesced and the students ushered me in past the barricades. We walked up a small and slightly inclined drive that was primed by manicured lawns and hedges that opened into a cluster of low buildings, where they deposited me at the professor’s office door with a ganbatte kudasai, good luck.

Dr. Koide appeared in the open doorway with eyes wrinkled in perplexity. He wore a grey blazer with matching pants and his graying hair stood in various directions of confusion.

“Nihongo?” He asked.

“No. English,” I responded.

“I never received your request for an interview.”

“That’s because I never made one, sir”

Dr. Koide’s mouth formed a thin white line and he began to shake his head as he retreated into the darker recesses of his office, behind stacks of books into a nook where his desk sat littered with papers. He hadn’t yet sat down and I was afraid he was going to ask me to leave. In a panic, my mouth unloaded a fusilade of apologies and excuses about bicycle tourism and the righteousness of investigative journalism.

Something I said vindicated me and a sudden change came across the Dr.’s face.

“Did you say you arrived by bicycle?” He asked.

Dr. Koide promptly sat down and offered me the empty seat across from his. As it turns out, the good doctor is an avid cyclist!

I was fortunate to have reached Dr. Koide on his lunch break and I am indebted to him that he so generously agreed to spend his precious free time speaking with the likes of me. Dr. Koide has held a tenure as assistant professor at KURRY since 1974 and he has to his credit an impressive array of books and articles dedicated to the abolition of nuclear power. Since the Daichi debacle, Japan has begun to take Dr. Koide’s prognostications quite seriously; previously, his was, as one reporter put it, “a voice in the wilderness in a nation committed to nuclear power”. In a highly publicized event, in those critical days following the Earthquake, Dr. Koide was one of four expert guests invited by the Government Oversight Committee of the House of Councilors to address the members of the Diet. Today, people flock to his lectures in numbers that evoke pop star status. His most recent book, “The Lies of Nuclear Power”, has became a near instant bestseller and his blog continues to be the most popular and trusted source for information related to Fukushima.

Dr. Koide’s story begins in 1968, when he was a freshman at Sendai’s Tohoku University, studying to be a nuclear engineer. Koide was a diligent student and began his university career very much committed to the nuclear optimism of his day. Some might think it ironic that a country, which suffered so much destruction at the hands of two nuclear bombs, would embrace so readily an energy of the same source. However, the splitting of the atom was a scientific breakthrough that was cause for enormous excitement and the 1950s saw a nuclear weltanschauung that dreamed a future in which nuclear power would fuel everything from medicine to automobiles. Furthermore, Eisenhower’s dubious “Atoms for Peace” campaign had a Cold War motive that spawned an arms race and obscured other promising energy technologies of the day, such as solar.

It was in Koide’s Freshmen year that he found his abolitionist calling, when a nuclear facility was to be erected in a nearby community of Onagawa and not in the city of Sendai, for which it was intended to serve. The Onagawa residents who protested its implementation were soon joined by Sendai’s Tohoku student movement, of which Koide was a member. Koide took to interrogating his professors about the true costs of nuclear power and it became evident to him that nuclear power was not as safe as its adherents claimed. Koide was particularly incensed by the socio-geographical choice for the location of the power plant, of which poor and marginal communities pay the biggest price. In short, the conclusion that Koide reached, which has become the leitmotif of his career, is that the risks of nuclear power far outweighed its benefits.

I asked Dr. Koide to break it down for me: the perceived benefits of nuclear power vs. its inherent risks. 

“To begin with it is a myth that nuclear power is a finite energy source or that it has a longer future than other nonrenewable energy sources. The power reserves of commercially exploitable coal alone can provide 60 to 70 years worth of global energy demand. If we could use the total reserve of coal, it would provide 800 years worth of world demand. Next to that, we have reserves of natural gas, oil and other sources that we are not really using right now, such as shale and tar sands. I had thought that these fossil fuels would someday be exhausted and nuclear energy was the future; but in fact, the world’s reserve of uranium is only a fraction of that of oil, and a small percentage of that of coal. Uranium is actually a very scarce resource”.

As for the risks, we are all too well acquainted. But what if we were to compare these risks to the likes of a nuclear bomb, such as Hiroshima?

“The bomb consisted of 800 grams of uranium, which exploded annihilating the city. Nuclear power however, requires one ton of uranium for one year - an enormous amount of radioactive material! A nuclear plant is a machine. It is expected that machines go wrong and cause accidents. It is we humans who operate the machines. Humans are not bad. It is only natural that humans make mistakes. No matter how we wish that no accidents occur, there is always the possibility of catastrophe. So what measures did the nuclear power policy makers take to deal with the possibility of accidents? They just assumed catastrophic accidents seldom occur. So they decided to ignore the possibility by labelling it as an ‘inappropriate assumption;. Here’s how they denied the possibility of catastrophic accidents. I took the following illustration from the website of Chubu Electric Power [At which point, Dr. Koide turned to his computer, pulled up the Chubu website and read me the following quote from the Energy Company’s media outlet] ‘There is absolutely no possibility of the containment vessel, the final barrier to contain radioactivity, being breached. A radioactive leak would be impossible. Therefore nuclear power plants are safe under any circumstances whatsoever and any assumption is an ‘inappropriate assumption’’. But a catastrophic accident has occurred and is still going on. Tragic events are underway in Fukushima, as you know. And the government’s responses to the ongoing accident have in my view, been highly inappropriate.”

What was the government’s response in the days following the Daiichi disaster and how was their response received by the Japanese people?

“The government hid information and delayed evacuation. The government has underestimated the risks and made optimistic assumptions. They delayed appropriate labeling of the accident, raising it from 4 to 5 and then at the last moment to 7. Evacuation first at 3km as ‘a precautionary measure’, then 10km ‘Just in case’, then 20km ‘preparing for the worse’. I believe disclosing accurate information is the only way to avoid panic. That way people would trust the administration of the government. The government has made plant workers and local residents sacrifice. They have raised radiation dose limit for the workers at Daiichi. They have also raised dose limits for residents. If Japanese law were applied strictly, an area the entire size of the entire prefecture of Fukushima would have to be abandoned and the havoc it would reek would be catastrophic. It is doubtful the country could afford to pay for it financially.

What do you believe is the current situation on the ground in Daiichi?

“I believe the reactor pressure vessel has a large hole, not the small hole that TEPCO says. There is no definite data as to whether there is any water in the containment vessel. Considering the reactor building basement is flooded with water, I think it is possible that it melted had already damaged the containment vessel. We’re in the unchartered territory that we enter for the first time ever since the human race started to use nuclear energy.

As to whether the radioactive material are going to be released into the atmosphere [from the meltdown and breach of the Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) and containment vessel], I don’t think it is likely as of now. The concrete foundation of the reactor building may have sustained some damage, but as a whole, I don’t think it is completely broken. I cannot properly assess the possibility of the corium melting through the concrete foundation and reaching the water table. If that should happen, the radioactive materials will flow in the groundwater and contaminate the ocean even more.

The thing to worry about is how far down the concrete the corium will go. The water circulation system using water in the building proposed by TEPCO is tantamount to admitting that the containment vessel is broken. It is a much more serious situation than I envisioned and there’s no other way to cool [the corium] other than the one proposed by TEPCO. However, if the corium goes into the concrete, no point in talking about circulating water to cool. There will be nothing you can do. The only way may be to entomb the whole building in a concrete coffin

How does the severity of this nuclear disaster compare with that which occurred at  Chernobyl?

Fukushima is still ongoing. There is a possibility of further hydrogen explosions and it is still possible that Fukushima exceeds Chernobyl in terms of magnitude of the disaster.”

Dr. Koide, having to return to his work, walked me out to my bicycle; but not before proudly showing me his own two-wheeler, which was parked just outside the building to his office, unlocked of course. Dr. Koide is a man who lives by example. He exhorts that the Japanese people must learn to live a lifestyle that consumes less energy and he himself, often rides his bike to work. With one final piece of wisdom, Koide sends me off with a quote of Mahatma Gandhi, which was noless inscribed on his memorial and of which Koide adapts to the precepts of nuclear abolition:

“The 7 sins of Nuclear Power: 1. Politics without principle; 2. Wealth without work; 3. Pleasure without conscience; 4. Knowledge without character; 5. Commerce without morality; 6. Science without humanity; 7. Worship without sacrifice.”