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Just came across this photo on Facebook with the caption:
How’s this for scary? This white blanket on the water is made up of tiny dead fish. This is 20 miles from the mouth of Mobile Bay. Sickening. I am sure this is just the beginning of what we will see. I am guessing this is from the toxic dispersant.
Grant Brissey covered everything from hard news and technology, to music, film, and visual arts during his time working for The Stranger. Grant's work has also appeared at Geekwire, and in Billboard,... More by Grant Brissey
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Every new photo brings more tears. I hope they hang that Hayward fucker!!!!
Unbelievable.
The Gulf is composed of sinners. Fish that fornicate. And gay fish. God has has spoken.
How’s that “Drill Baby Drill” workin’ out for ya’?
Whose photo is it? Where can I see the original? PLEASE credit the photos you borrow from Flickr!
Ugh. My dad was a marine biologist on the Texas Gulf Coast while I was growing up. I got my own marine bio training in Port Aransas. I know the Gulf like the back of my hand in some ways, albeit small ones. Even the parts I don’t know feel like home. It’s an incredible ecosystem and a beautiful place, and now it’s poisoned. It makes me so sick I can’t think about it. I don’t want to know what it’s like down at the Marine Science Institute right now. I don’t know if the oil has gotten there and I don’t think I want to find out, because there’s no good answer.
@5: The Gulf Coast has been poisoned in more than one way for a very long time. This spill is just amplified radically and more immediate. Then there’s the decades of nutrient eutrophication from the Mississippi, causing the “Dead Zone”, and all that discharge from the Baytown and Beaumont refineries, amongst others.
Photo by Sarah Ashley Longshore
poor fishies
This is a situation where I would support the death penalty. There’s no way they can ever repay their dept to the ecosystem or society. There is no way they can be rehabilitated. The suffering and death this spill has brought is intolerable.
Yes, oil culture is doing this to the whole world slowly, but BP and Dick Cheney worked tirelessly to maximize the ammount of harm they could do without consequences.
Now imagine that each pair of fish is an Iraqi or Afghan.
Gotta love the oil industry.
@6, believe me, I know. There’s a reason we always referred to Texas City, across the bay, its lights visible over the horizon, as Toxic City. There was already plenty of shrimp trawling, waste dumping, eutrophication, and erosion. We really didn’t need this. The Gulf was already in plenty of trouble.
@8, actually, you might be surprised just how much harm could be undone if our government only had the balls to just seize BP and liquidate its assets. I suspect there would be plenty of money in that to fund pretty much all the remediation efforts we could want. That’s even more true if we also seized and liquidated the other two perpetrators, Halliburton and Transocean. The amount of money those sorts of entities possess is just unimaginable.
This is one area where the Reaganite doctrine of corporate personhood seems to break down. When a corporation wants to receive benefits, its a person, but when it commits a crime, it just can’t seem to be localized sufficiently for the law to get a grip on it.
Dramatic photo – but photo probably not oil related…
“An official at Alabama Marine Resources told News Five officials are aware of the situation and its nothing unusual. He said the fish are Gulf menhaden, and fish kills like this happen around this time of the year because menhaden become so plentiful in an area that they use up all the oxygen in the water.”
http://www.wkrg.com/alabama/article/thou…
There was a similar die off about a month ago in Pascagoula, MS.
http://www.sunherald.com/2010/05/10/2169…
And before people shit their pants – In comment #11, I”m not saying the oil spill isn’t an ecological disaster. Just saying this fish die off is apparently not oil related.
@13, I was wondering about that. We’ve had some heartbreaking die offs happen up in Hood Canal here, not that most locals care; definitely related to nasty environmental conditions in the Sound, but not due to oil spills.
balderdash @10
Corporate personhood is not a Reaganite doctrine. It’s been around way longer than that.
Just as a corporation has some of the rights of a person, it can also be sued and otherwise punished by law. And just as many people will game existing systems of regulation, so will corporations.
The problem possible here (and we’re not sure it’s a problem yet – we need to see how the lawsuits shake out first) is not the nature of corporations – it’s the lack of ability or lack of desire of our regulators and judicial system to enforce existing laws and regulations.
He who smelt it.
Dealt it.
@14
Come on, don’t take the wind out of my sails. Somehow Reagan came to embody everything that’s wrong with modern politics even when he wasn’t to blame for it.
And you’re wrong that laws and regulations aren’t enforced. They are, at least some of the time. It’s just that the type of penalty that would be a devastating penance for an individual is an impotent scolding when applied to a multi-billion-dollar transnational entity. The like of Phillip Morris and Exxon scoff at mere hundreds of millions.
Anyway, don’t mind me. I’m just griping. What else can I do? I can’t clean up the oil or punish the transgressors. I don’t even make enough money to donate much to cleanup efforts. “My” elected officials certainly aren’t going to do anything useful. Griping is all I have.
Sooo….
If it is from the toxic dispersant, then what message is being sent?
@!6, don’t stop. Keep griping and paying attention. For my own sake, I find it helpful to focus less on what punishment I’d choose for BP and more on the efforts to stop the spill and mitigate the heartbreaking damage.
@3,
How about we plug the hole by making Sarah Palin wrap her big mouth around it and suck it up?
Mrs. Norris, I love you. Fabulous.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
But the important thing is we are still driving like nothing ever happened. Not only that, gas prices have dropped since the oil disaster started. So feel free to drive all day long!!!
If those are menhaden, that’s where fish oil supplements come from.
@14: I still think that it should be possible to imprison a corporation if it breaks the law.
You Liberals have nothing to worry about.
Your Fierce Advocate has been ALL OVER
this crisis from DAY ONE….
9
thanks for trying to cheer us up
not saying its right but i lived close to Houston/galveston in the 80s and crude oil blobs were just as common as dead jelly fishes; and you could always see the oil rigs
“I am guessing this is from the toxic dispersant.”
Based on what? Post hoc ergo propter hoc
ANWR’s looking pretty good right about now.
@24 They got approval to drill in March 2008. Obama wasn’t in office.
its inherently obvious that deep water drilling is more dangerous than shallow water drilling. but, geez, scientists cannot even agree on biological or abiotic creation of crude oil. oh well. ignorance is king. as plato said “i know nothing” anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.
Heck of a job Kenny!
Does anyone know a good org. where I can donate money for the clean up efforts? Balderdash?
Just don’t want to donate to red tape. thanks
Autopsy on each tiny fish, please.
@34
Stephen Colbert has set up some “Gulf of America Fund.” Not Gulf of Mexico since we broke it…
don’t forget about the other rigs in the Gulf of Mexico