MOTHER JONES– Lots has changed on Elmer’s Island. Nearly a year after the great oilpocalypse of 2010, this Louisiana wildlife refuge about 50 miles south of New Orleans isn’t crawling with teams of cleanup workers raking big black pools
of crude off the sand; there’s no cleanup machinery or equipment; the
only immediately visible remnants of the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill are
the occasional tarballs, big as a kid’s head, that wash onto the shore.
Not that I can just waltz onto this public beach to see all that—not everything has changed. Like some lame iteration of Groundhog Day, the hundredth time I try to pull onto the Elmer’s Island access road from Highway 1 in southern Louisiana—some 200 days after the last time I tried it—I am, once again, stopped. Last year, it was cops blocking the road. Now it’s private security hired by BP.
“You have to get permission from central command to come on here, and then you’ll probably have to be escorted by an official,” the security guard tells me.
“How hard is it to get permission?”
“Usually pretty hard.” She says a local reporter couldn’t get through recently.
Read more on BP Doesn’t Want You to See Its Tarballs.
© 2011 Mother Jones
Photo by Flickr USFWS Southeast
