Video - Skimming Oil off of Dauphin Island

Tyvek suits! Aren't worth a damn!

Hey everyone,

I just got back from 3 days on the Gulf. It was my first oil action, and I didn't quite realize how awful it was going to be.

Memorial day weekend for me was supposed to be real light, and easy. Saturday I went in to work at 5:30 and they let us go around 7:30. Sunday was the same story; Monday started off the same, so we all decided to head down to Biloxi and gamble at 8 in the morning. We roamed around the casino for a little bit, I finally decided to play some texas hold em, about 5 hands into the game my capt. came over and informed me we had been deployed and need to leave( I thought we was saying this because I just won a big hand) Needless to say, we got a call and all they said was report to the boats in one hour. So we raced back to our hotel and threw 2 days worth of close in bag. Once at the boats, we were informed a patch of oil had been spotted off Dauphin Island, and away we went. It took us about 2 hours to get there, by this time it was about 2 in the afternoon.

My first glimpse of oil, it was just little, red rust chunks floating in the water. We put on our tyvek suits, which lasted all about 2 minutes before they rip in the grotch or butt. I mean, mine ripped just from putting on socks this morning, (some of you might be thinking "Hey dummy get a bigger suit," well this was a XXL suit! I didnt get it either.) Anyway, back to the oil. We got under way and the shrimp boats began corraling concentrated areas of the clumps towards out skimmer. These chunks would band together as they got funneled closer to our boats. When it comes on board our skimmer squeezes it to get the water to come out, making the oil look like fudge as it rolls off the belt into the holding tank. It kinda looks like fudge, but sometimes it has a browner color and begins to look like peanut butter. It is super sticky once you get in yourselves hard to get off. I have to use Gojo or dawn soap.(gojo works better) It began to get to dark to see, so we set off to find a place for the shrimp boats to anchor. Once we found a place we came aboard a shrimp boat and spent the night. Though, they were not prepared for us to spend the night becuase we were originally supposed to be staying on that lift barge I told yall about earlier. But they were being complete morons and wouldnt let us on board. Don't ask me why. So the first night on the shrimp boat they didnt have enough beds because we had a Safety officer, Bp Rep, 2 shrimp decks, the capt. and his wife and 3 of us. So the capt. gave me his bed, and his wife gave hers to another, my other co worker slept on a sofa in the galley. (the capt. slept in the wheel house, his wife on another sofa in the galley)

The next night the safety rep, and Bp man were gone, so I got one of there beds. Just a mattress and a pillow, no blanket, it wasnt bad. The next day, we woke up to a broken boom and storms off in the distance; so we got out in my notorious zodiac and putted along to fix the boom. The storms built up and stopped our work for about an hour. Once we got it fixed we went out in search of oil. Around 4, we got a ride back from a transportation barge back to Pascagoula to have a nights rest and figure out the living situation at sea.

I am sorry I flew through this blog I am extremely tired I just got back in from all this. One last thing, we have helicopters who fly above us to find the oil. Those helicopters to videos of us skimming and that video made it up to BP's board. My supervisor claims when they saw it that they all stood and applauded, and were amazed at what a good job we were doing. We estimated somewhere between 1500 and 3000 gallons.

More later.....

First Blog!

Hey everyone,

This is my first blog, hope yall enjoy it. I started a blog for those of you who want to know exactly what I am doing down here. The first question folks usually ask me is how did I come about getting this job. Well, while attending USA I took a field study, which had an optional extra portion of the class call hazwoper training, not to many students took it because its miserable. But I heard it would help get me a job, so I decided to take the course. Hazwoper stands for Hazardous Waster Operations Emergency Response, in a nut shell its training to deal with bad chemicals. While dealing with those bad chemicals, I had to wear a tyvek suit on top of my work clothes, its like being wrapped in plastic. Anyway, back to the oil spill. On April 20th, an oil rig blew up just south of Venice, Louisana. Being in geology we all kept a close eye on what was going on. Then it hit me I had just been trained for this last summer, so I put a resume together posted it on the internet, and Bingo! I had job offers come flooding in, (if any of you want to work down here that's literally all you need. OSHA 40 Hazwoper training check it out).

I got a job with a labor company who informed me I would be on a ship the entire time. So we set out to Louisana to get aboard. Well thats when plans changed and I was driving to Gulfport on a early friday morning. We arrived looking for a ship that was going to pick us up. We came to the only ship there that was not a cargo ship and figured this has to be it. Someone yelled to a deckhand, Are yall the ones waiting on a crew? They replied, " Yes come on aboard." We boarded a narrow gangway with luggage in tow. Everyone set there stuff on the deck. It was a boat straight out of Deadliest catch. Long deck with no back end, so that crab traps and ropes could slide right off into the water. The capt. invited us into the galley and explained several safety issues, then turned it over to the cook. The cook made a big deal about his galley, the do's and don'ts. We ate breakfast and then everyone went back out to get there luggage and find there way to a bunk. That's when the capt. realized we are not the crew that he was waiting on. So we got off with a free meal.

Finally, we figure out in the confusion, we are not going on a ship anymore, we are working on the docks building SupSalv Navy Marcos Skimmers. They were in peices like a giant erector set. A crane would lift peices as we would fit them together. By lunch time, my team had put 3 of them together. After lunch my friend Peter, (Peter is a classmate of mine who I dragged along to keep me company, who consequently has quit) came to me and said that 4 of us were moving to Pascagoula. I have been here in Pascagoula ever since.

I work here in Pascagoula, in conjunction with BP and the Coast Guard, operating the same boats I was putting together the very first day. The ship is approx. 30 foot long and maybe 10 feet wide its not big at all. Most of the equipment takes up all the room on board. there is no where comfortable to sit and to make it worse there is very little shade, (though we have added a tent but it covers the equipment more than us. To sum it up, the boat has to be pulled through the water by 2 other vessels who tow us with boom lines, (Booms are inflatable bouys that are used to corral and funnel the oil directly to our ship). We have hired 2 shrimp boats to pull us. Once the oil is pushed toward our boat, we lower a treadmill looking belt into the water that slowly spins pullin the oil and some seawater aboard, then drops it into a storage tank below. Once our storage tank is full we decant the water off of the oil we just collected, then pump the oil into a bladder that is dragging behind the boat. The bladder can hold up to 50,000 gallons of oil before needing to be emptied. So far we have only been practicing I have yet to actually skim any oil.

My day starts at 5am, we have 2 spud barges (lift barges) that support us if we ever go out for extended periods. My crew has been broken into 2 teams because we have 2 boats. So half my team meets on one barge the other on the other. I always have to race to the wrong barge every morning because they have a better cook, and I have to eat breakfast and get back to my barge before our safety meeting starts. Safety meetings are fairly short we discuss goals for the day and ways to stay safe. Same old same old. After that we go to our boats prep them and take them out. We stay out for 3 or so hours then come back and prepping them for docking takes about 3 hours. It's very tedious and sometimes very boring, but the feed us well, and pay us well. And I am tired of writing More to come. AND PICTURES! All you english majors point out the mistakes and I will fix them.