Oil cleanup with "fancy towels"

"We don't need this on camera: BP's Crappy Clean-up Job

motherjones.com

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/8063bc311976.jpg[/atsimg]

[Expletive edited by OP in source text]

We paddled on and pulled up on Grande Terre, where the oil stretched as far as we could see in deep dark pools. We encountered a cleanup crew supervisor gunning around on his ATV, who said there were all of 30 workers on the whole island, which he said is five miles long. For the hour we walked around, only three of them were working anyway, while the rest sat in the shade. And the work consisted of somewhat haphazardly laying down paper towels. [Update/clarification: Though the workers referred to them as paper towels, they are indeed slightly thicker, oil-absorbent pads, as several commenters have pointed out. Since that wouldn't be clear to everyone from the pictures, I definitely should have been less cheeky and more specific: These are very fancy towels that a few dudes are dropping along the shore to combat the multimillion-gallon spill.]

Ugh! It just can't get any more disgusting (hopefully) how little they are doing over there to clean up their mess. That would be like me spilling a measuring cup of cooking oil, grabbing a paper towel and ripping off tiny pieces one at a time and lying them on the spill to try to soak it up. Incompetence? Apathy? Mental deficiency? What is wrong with these guys?

At the end of the article, the author mentions how they were leaving in their canoe and saw some dolphins swimming along with them. They were blowing the oil/water out of the blowholes!

I suppose the 60 or so dolphins swimming the pass with us don't have that option; things got a little (more) depressing in the kayak when we saw that they were blowing it out through their holes.

No wonder they don't want people to see what is going on out there. I think that just like the Vietnam war coverage was a precursor to the filtered coverage we get of the Middle East wars, they learned their lesson with the coverage on the Exxon Valdez spill.

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[edit on 14-6-2010 by nunya13]

I believe this is just the start of it. We are going to be seeing this for months and the aquatic wildlife is in for one hell of a time. My heart bleeds when you see the pictures of them, those pictures we actually get to see.

Thanks for posting

[edit on 14-6-2010 by TortoiseKweek]

reply to post by TortoiseKweek


I just can't imagine anyone thinking cleaning the oil stained shores with fancy paper towels is going to even remotely put a dent in it. Could you imagine if some MSM outlet reported this? People would be outraged. And to have only 30 people on cleanup duty on a shore that stretches for miles?! According to the article the author only saw a handful of them doing anything worthwhile and it was laying down paper towels.