The BP spill shut down the Rookses’ shrimping business for five months. They received four weeks’ worth of clean-up work from BP’s Vessels of Opportunity program, and Darla believes they were cut loose because she wouldn’t stop speaking her mind about the oil. They were living with relatives at the time of the spill, but without an income, couldn’t afford to pay rent, and neither Darla nor Todd can stand being a freeloader. So they moved onto their boat, into a closet-sized cabin with twin bunk beds, a coffee pot, a small portable stove, and a microwave.
Not only were they suddenly in dire financial straits, but the ecosystem surrounding them was in ruins. "As we’d be going down to Venice to provide paperwork for our claims, and searching for a job hopefully working with BP, there were sea gulls dead all over the road," Darla says. "They weren’t hit by a car. They didn’t have oil on them. There was nothing wrong with them that you could see. I actually saw a couple of them flying and drop out of the sky."
She fell into despair. "At one point, I put a hangman’s noose on the back rigging of the boat. I was ready to stick my head in it," she says. Todd had trouble dealing with his wife’s anguish. "I didn’t understand her side of being depressed," he says. "She didn’t understand my side of getting mad. And I’d get mad at her for being depressed." He pops open another Red Bull as he tells the story. "I can understand why there was all the divorces,” he adds. (Steve Picou, a University of South Alabama sociologist who studies the human impact of disasters, say there were "numerous divorces" after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It’s too early, he says, to compile divorce data for the BP spill’s aftermath.)
A doctor acquaintance intervened when Darla felt suicidal. "He told me dead people don’t talk, dead people don’t sue, dead people don’t tell the truth, and dead people don’t bother BP. So I started thinking: You know what? I’m going to do what’s right and I’m going to tell the truth, even if it costs me financially." Last month, at a town hall meeting in Buras, Rooks told a group of fisherman, "We need to stand up and fight or there will be nothing left. If you say nothing, you get nothing."
http://www.onearth.org/article/gulf-shrimpers-wonder-are-we-next-on-the-extinction-list
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
