By Diane Wilson
I’m a fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf Coast, on a boat since I was eight. Over the last two decades, I’ve become a self-appointed watchdog of the chemical, oil, and gas corporations that are decimating the Gulf.
I hate to say it, but what I’m seeing now in the Gulf ain’t nothing new. The toxic releases, the lies, the cover-ups, the skimping on safety, the nonexistent documents, the “swinging door” with regulators, the deaths. Same ole same ole.
What is new is the massive nature of the oil gusher and the fact that it can’t be covered up because it’s ongoing and being videoed. This elephant can’t be swept under the carpet, but I’m sure if BP could, BP would.
There are politicians out there — we’ve all heard them — who say this oil spill is just one accident and one accident does not a case make. Heck, one plane crashes and you don’t stop flying, do ya? Well, this isn’t just one accident. This is the biggest flame among the thousands of fires set by Corporate America on its Sherman-like march across the Gulf.
I run an injured-workers group for people who got canned after they got sick or injured, and for whistleblowers and others who tried to make changes that their companies didn’t want. For many of them, there’s nobody to talk to except me — a high school–educated fisherwoman with a pile of kids and a broke-down truck. One worked in wastewater and said his supervisors were manipulating and hiding wastewater data, sometimes dumping outright or siphoning material out of test samples. Sometimes gauge needles were bent to keep them from showing what they should have been showing.
A few times, the worker had to wade through a diked wastewater area the size of two-city blocks with toxic waste coming over his boots. He lost his hard hat, lost his gloves, maggots were crawling everywhere, and right next to him was a high-voltage pump. He said a lot of days he thought he’d die, but telling didn’t do any good. As any good workers knows: You keep your mouth shut, ‘cause a good way to lose your job or lose your bonus is to report a worker injury or a safety violation.
That wasn’t my first dance at that rodeo. I’ve had a Texas wastewater investigator pass me information because he couldn’t do anything with test results showing extremely high levels of priority pollutants like vinyl chloride and ethylene dichloride in the water. He said every time he tried to pass it up further in enforcement, something blocked it. It just so happened that his boss, the director, had applied for a job at the polluting plant. He sure didn’t want to think what that was all about. Made him sick just thinking about it.
Made me sick, too. Made me want to get on a boat and go out on the bay and forget all of it. Last time I was on the bay, however, a seismograph crew breezed in, looking for oil and gas deposits. There are approximately 4,000 oil and gas rigs out in the Gulf, but there are a sizable number in the bays, too. Seismologist teams sometimes use dynamite blasts to produce sound waves that pinpoint oil and gas deposits. Generally, dynamite charges aren’t allowed near the reefs and they’re not supposed to be so powerful that they blow up fish. That’s the law, anyhow, but who’s listening? I was trotlining for black drum and I had a string of lines near an oyster reef that black drum love to hang around. I picked up my line and there, hanging off the hooks, was a very long line of dynamite charges. Things really got messy when the dynamite blasts started rocking the fishermen’s boats and blowing fish out of the water.
To stop the obvious show of dead fish, the company brought in a three airboats. An airboat can generate decibels equivalent to a jet plane, so imagine three giant airplanes ripping and running up and down the bay to scare the fish out of the bay. Well, they accomplished their goal. All the fish ran out of the bay and there went our fish for the entire season. It was nothing but a bleep on an oil company’s corporate work sheet, but for our family-based inshore fishermen, it was devastating.
That’s not all. Just listen. The oil industry dumps over a billion pounds of mercury-contaminated drilling-mud wastes into the Gulf each year. Drilling muds are used to cool and lubricate drill bits as they bore into the earth while plumbing for oil and natural gas. The mercury is present in an element called barite, the main ingredient in the muds. In l996, the EPA limited the amount of mercury that could be present in the drilling muds to one part per million, which could still allow l,000 pounds of mercury to be dumped from the Gulf platforms each year. For 50 years prior to the EPA rule, there were no limits on mercury in barite. A report published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers suggested that, in the past, barite with mercury up to 30 parts per million could have been used. Looking at information supplied by the oil industry and the EPA, hundreds of thousands of pounds of mercury have been dumped in the Gulf via drilling muds since the l960s.
So it shouldn’t be surprising at all that some oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are so contaminated by mercury that they could qualify for Superfund status. The mercury concentrations in many fish sampled near at least one rig were high enough to qualify the area as a contaminated fishery.
And the contaminated drilling mud doesn’t stay in the Gulf. Some of it gets dumped into marshes along small fishing villages on the Gulf Coast. I’ve seen tanker trucks dump 200 loads into a marsh outside of Seadrift, Texas, and another load dumped a half-mile from my trailer. My frequent calls to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission were answered with, “It’s harmless.” I guess I should tell that to my autistic son.
The bottom line is that the Gulf of Mexico dies a little every day from the tens of thousands of chemical plants, oil refineries, and oil and gas rigs that pockmark the Gulf and its coastlines. It’s a death of ten thousand cuts, and many of these offenses don’t get reported at all. We, the public, really have no way of knowing. The companies and the agencies certainly aren’t going to tell us. They’ve proved that time and time again. The truth of the matter only becomes clear when something monstrous like the BP oil spill comes along and wakes us up to the nightmare.
“I was astonished to learn several years ago,… that the creation of Israel was very much related to making sure the West had a foothold in the Middle East for oil-related purposes.… I’d always previously assumed Israel existed so that persecuted Jews would have a place to go and feel safe after WWII.”
Morgana — conversely, I’ve spent my life feeling that I’m overly cynical, probably because the world around me has always/mostly been bought and sold by propaganda/marketing while I was asking the questions.
I continue to have a hard time accepting my intuition regarding people and situations as I really had it beat out of me.
Right now is a time of massive revelation for me too.- That is, to know that I CAN trust myself. It is a matter now of developing that habit. My point to you is – there are different levels of denial we have existed within – that we are awakening from them all is what counts.
Was considering the link to ‘how we make our money’ from that same house and the link to Israel/Gaza. The hold Israel (seemingly) has over USA. Oil.
I was astonished to learn several years ago, while perusing government documents at the Harry S. Truman Library online website, that the creation of Israel was very much related to making sure the West had a foothold in the Middle East for oil-related purposes. I could almost feel the wheels grinding in my head as I put those pieces together. It was a fairly seismic shift for me… I’d always previously assumed Israel existed so that persecuted Jews would have a place to go and feel safe after WWII.
My inner “starry-eyed idealist” has really been taking a beating these past few years. But it’s always best to make sure such a thing acts in service to the truth. We live and learn, hopefully.
HazelF,
You are too modest. If intuition is your sole informant then you are way ahead of any of us here! Totally agree with your assessments and wasn’t that a Uranian shocker about the suicides. Good grief. What you say regarding, “all these situations”; that being underpinned by something we can’t see and being underpinned to each other. It is way too much to grasp all at once. For me anyway. For now anyway. I guess that’s where faith comes in.
Keep that intuition of yours cleaned up and ready to go. It serves us well!
Thanks BK – brilliant as usual. Interesting the link to values (from the 2nd). Clean up our act indeed.
I don’t have your knowledge or expertise, so go by intuition (faulty occasionally!). Was considering the link to ‘how we make our money’ from that same house and the link to Israel/Gaza. The hold Israel (seemingly) has over USA. Oil.
To me, there is something of the ‘what lies beneath’ aspect of Pluto as well as transformation. As if there is so much more underpinning all these situations than what we we are seeing on the surface. And Chiron seems to be the x-ray, the highlighter pen – one key route to awareness.
I am also startled by the revelations of 13 suicides this year so far in the Apple i-pad factory in China – and how Apple is handling its PR on that one too. People get to work 12 hour days for £90 a week, one day off in 12 – but Apple says it’s a good deal. Something to think about before purchasing Apple mac products.
Revelations.
Love hxx
HazelF,
Good morning! This is one tragedy that isn’t going away is it? Like Yeshe’s voice told her, this is a message for all humanity, and there are a lot of us, so it will take a while.
As for Pluto’s part, you could point out that, along with Ceres, he was on the cusp of the 2nd house of the event chart, so values, for the long haul, will be the raison d’etra for these two, and Pluto being evolutionary in nature and transformative in purpose could sum up the meaning of BP’s blunder. And that covers a lot of territory; values regarding business practices, values regarding the earth, values regarding our country’s ethics and values regarding the future of our children and the future of the earth itself.
The same could be said of his transiting sextile to the U.S. progressed Sun which should be exact by the end of next year.
After thinking and writing for over 40 days about the unstoppable avalanche of oil rising out of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico I see that it is a concert of effort on the part of the life force of creation. It seems every symbol in astrology. . . planets, asteroids, invisible points of reference, squares, oppositions and on and on has been utilized to send us a message; the same message Yeshe has written here. Clean up your act, mankind.
As we have learned from various sources, including Eric and others who write at this site, Pluto, along with Neptune and Uranus will address the major evolutionary issues in their own way, with Pluto annihilating that which needs to be reborn. So that is his contribution; in this case, wetlands, birds, fish, water, livelihoods, attitudes, dreams and more will have to transform. Because its time to change.
I chose Chiron to watch as to the timing of the unfolding of events in this matter because of his affinity with Pluto and his methods, and because he was sextile the big P, and because he is patient in his communication, and because he went into Pisces the day before this tragedy first became conscious to humans in general. By Spring of 2012 Chiron will conjunct the U.S. progressed Sun in Pisces, “land” of the fishes in the deep blue sea.
If the details of the “oil leak” remain important for us to focus on then my guess is that Chiron’s aspects to other “planets” (Juno, Venus, Sun, etc.) could explain the meaning of those details. He, Chiron, translates the outer, more subtle (or not, in the case of Uranus!) messages to the inner hearts and minds of our species to make sense of it. We are all here to learn, and by God will learn or die trying!
be
Diane Wilson along with Martin Prechtel were guests of Caroline Casey- on her Visionary Activist show on KPFA Thusday may 13th archive…Really great, check it out..
Thank you Diane…
I had the privledge to work for the NOAA, UW school of Oceanography, WA state, Parks, WA Department of Ecology as a Conservationist who worked with many other Government agencies including Forest service, Tribes, Fisheries. They all had the same thing in common – Massive Coruption on almost every levels… All these agencies are in sooo deep with the very people/resources they are suposed to regulate, for instance the monitoring data is altered to give “the right numbers”.
My heart was often broken working in these places to see this shit going on, and I quit after an incident where I was threatened for not going along with things, left for good 10 years ago.
There are good people at those agencies, mean well, but you do not stay in good standing at your government job if you buck the system- and that is what I did.
So I work for myself these past years to do as much good in the world as I can through what I do and open the minds of those who will hear that you cannot trust that your government will do the right thing for the people or the environment- we must wake up to this and all get more involved personaly and collectively.
Here’s the rest… can’t post more than a few links at once I’ve discovered.
a book: “Gut and Psychology Syndrome” by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride
yahoo group: http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/healingleakygut/
organization started by women local to me (DC): http://www.unlockingautism.org
Diane, I read this last night and was reminded of the nightmare I was awakened to, and who the heck wants to wake up to that? A nightmare. I felt myself rejecting your story (a form of denial), and I apologize for that.
Your words worked on me through the night though, and I woke up this morning with a memory of someone I met in January of 2007 while in Texas. I don’t remember the details much, but I do remember she was among the few fighting for mother nature, and humanity, and against chemical conglomerates and users of such. The few stories I heard left my mouth gaping and I felt true appreciation for her and those like her for living a principled life, even in the face of such daunting obstacles and aggression, even.
With that came to memory a poem on the back of one of the t-shirts I received during the Anacostia Watershed Society’s annual cleanup on Earth Day 2007 (or maybe 2008, I don’t have my t-shirt here to verify). I had scanned this poem into a .pdf file to send to her – here it is now:
The River Runs Through Me
I stand lingering on the bank of a stream,
I do not know.
Afraid to put my hand into the glistening water
Yet the river runs through me.
I am my father’s child.
Born of the corky brown shore,
that surrounds the clicky clackey sound of a giggling waters.
Hand and hand, I have walked this place before.
Never really hearing the much needed story
Of how…
The river runs through me.
but, now
I do want to know more of this thingamajig
That beckons, to touch its mirrored surface
Defining the moment, I endure.
Bent down, my shaken kneecaps locked in fear.
My neck is straight out long.
Finally, I touch my hand into the river
A cool current runs through my mind
Gently parting the hair on the back of my neck
Running through me.
by Raeye Aikens-Cummings, Archbishop Carroll High School, 18 years old, 12th grade
Thank you for what you do, for your losses, for your commitment, for continuing to fight. I am sorry I was so absent to the plight of people just like you for so very long.
Regarding your son, I have read many personal accounts of autism being cured or greatly improved through a stringent diet. If you have not explored this avenue yet, please do.
Here is some information I gleaned off my one of my yahoo groups that is centered mostly around raw milk, but also nutrient-dense foods in general, which are obtained from local farmers/producers. Other topics do come up, though. This list is certainly only a starting point, as there is so much more to autism and diet than what is here, and your proximity to the Gulf and the chemicals there is (most probably) playing a role.
info: http://bodyecology.com/autism.php
“Pasteurized Milk and its Link to Autism”: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2003/07/02/pasteurized-milk-part-three.aspx (I have the text to this article and if you want it I will send it to you. I don’t think it’s available for free.)
cholesterol and autism: http://www.greatplainslaboratory.com/home/eng/cholesterol.asp
and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18386207?dopt=AbstractPlus
Please remain ever-vigilant in your fight.
Patricia MoonRose
BK – hello! Hope you’re well. Picking those fine brains of yours – just wondered where you saw Pluto in all of this? (you know, Pipe Line Under The Ocean = oil). Hx
Thank you for validating a message I received at sunrise monday morning on the beach praying for our oceans. First off, i am not one to fully trust the little wee voice in my head that i hear once in a while, but here is the message i heard: that all is in perfect order with the oil well gusher; the gulf and oceans have been slowly being poisoned and polluted, out of sight and out of the consciousness of the inhabitants of earth and this slow, painful death cannot continue anymore. Thus, the oil well incident occurred to bring the issue into the hearts and minds of humanity, beyond the point of denial, so that the poisoning could be stopped once and for all.
Take it for what you will. There are larger forces at work. It’s up to us whether we listen and act accordingly or resist or turn a deaf ear.
On an astrological note, I was observing that the U.S. Mars in its progressed chart is retrograde and has been for several years now. If Mars represents energy, and oil is energy, might not the oil gusher in the Gulf represent a Mars turned in on itself?
In fact, in the U.S. progressed chart Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune are all retrograde. so it appears we, as a country, have much to mull over.
Thank you Diane. I am praying for you and for all of us. Now I am convinced more than ever that our eyes had to be forced open to see what was in front of us all along. There is hope for us yet.
Thank you, Diane, for sharing your story. Ditto on what Len said. But I’d like to add that the kind of information you shared is so so so valuable. The information on mercury, especially so. Take care. I’m far away but thinking of you. xm
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You msut send this in to Huffington Post, MSNBC for use on Maddow or Olbermann, Wash Po and NY Times until you get a hit.
Expand it even. Its well written and the kind of information and first hand knowledge that must be given attention.
Contact Douglas Brinkley, the historian, too, who wrote the book about Katrina and has been a constant talking head on CNN about the chicanery of BP and oil spill.
http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/14213/Douglas_Brinkley/index.aspx
May the Force be with you.
Diane,
Thank you for a well-written, eye-opening, get-real piece of work. My heart goes out to you and your son.