Slowly but surely, workers wearing haz-mat gear raked, shoveled and bagged their way down the Fort Morgan beach, quietly suppressing the Blob That Ate Gulf Shores.
Or was attempting to consume it. The blob — residue from remnants of the oil spill that's been washing up on the beaches of northwest Florida and Alabama — is actually fairly benign. But there, nonetheless.
The impact on the Gulf Shores economy is anything but benign. The real blob in this scenario includes the lack of lines at venerable local dives like Sea 'N Suds, hotspots usually packed from April through October.
The Work Blog family vacationed June 26 through July 3 in Gulf Shores (Fort Morgan to be precise), Work Blogger himself determined to prove correct his theory that the national media was locked in overkill mode when it came to the impact of the spill on the beaches of the Redneck Riviera.
For weeks leading up to the beach trip, we heard conflicting reports — the news reporting the overbearing smell, sticky tar balls and ugly mess; friends of friends touting business-as-usual with no worries and little if no evidence of oil.
What we discovered: A little of both. For three of the seven days we were there, oil was a factor.
From the perspective of the workers hired to clean up the beaches, however, it likely isn't possible to underscore the impact of the ongoing BP oil spill.
When we arrived in Gulf Shores, we saw cleanup crews congregated at checkpoints along Fort Morgan Road. They stood out in their neon-green shirts, and most of them, we venture to guess, would have preferred to be earning a living on their fishing boats but nonetheless grateful for a paying gig.
The crews are working under the umbrella of Little Rock's own CTEH, a nationally prominent and very much under-the-radar environmental waste cleanup firm contracted by BP to coordinate the cleanup on the beaches. It was involved in the post-Katrina cleanup of New Orleans.
(For more on CTEH's role in the cleanup click here.)
We saw a few tar balls during the first couple of days on the beach but otherwise no evidence of the spill. A mile or two down the beach, though, instead of the usual mass of sunbathers and swimmers along the Fort Morgan beach, we could see the neon haze of the cleanup crew slowly working its way down the coast.
Having started, presumably, at Orange Beach, crews were moving west down the pennisula, through Gulf Shores and on toward Mobile Bay. Each day, we'd watch them inch a little closer. Their pace surely slowed on day 3 of the trip when Hurricane Alex sent its surge (waves of 4-6 feet), and with it lots of oil.
Storms will push remnants of the spill onto the beach, and that high-tide marker is what the workers are cleaning. Tar balls seemed to come and go with the tide; sometimes you'd come out of the water wearing streaks of brown that appeared out of nowhere.
The day Alex hit land, the change was drastic. The oil was gone. All that was left were remnants of the high-tide marker left by the storm surge earlier in the week.
The cleanup crew finally reached our spot on the day we left. Its ranks consisted of men and women; a couple of them said they were fishermen. We hope their current line of work is a temporary diversion. Their jobs entailed raking the residue (essentially brown, sticky sand — some of it hot little cauldrons of sunbaked tar), then shoveling it into plastic bags. Haz-mat gear was required by OSHA, as were 10-minute shifts. One three or four-man crew would scoop for 10 minutes while the other would sit under a tent. Again, OSHA.
Nothing like government efficiency.
Meanwhile, frollicking kids ran and all but belly-flopped through the very mess they were cleaning with such caution. (The oil, by the way, which would stick to the skin like little brown moles, came off relatively easily with Dawn and elbow grease. And there was never any smell.)
Best we could tell, the crews worked roughly 8 a.m-4 p.m. days. We saw no evidence of any overnight cleaning as has been reported. At least not on the beach. (And no evidence of the impact on wildlife, and we saw tons of crabs, gulls, pelicans, even a pod of dolphins.)
For four of the seven days we were there, it was business as usual: clear, emerald-tinged water, white sandy beaches, and thanks to Alex body-surfing Shangri-la.
But there was a noticeable lack of people in Gulf Shores. We'd guess roughly a third to a half of the normal crowd. And as long as the weather keeps pushing oil into shore, the impact could be much longer lasting than that of a single-event hurricane.
Hopefully, eventually, the weather won’t have anything left to push in, and the guys in neon green can get back to their fishing boats and the folks at Sea 'N Suds back to their overflow crowds.
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