There's a hole in the Ocean and in our hearts

There's a hole in the Ocean

 Gulf Coast Oil Spill Disaster - Official Music Video - A Hole in the Ocean

This song was written to keep the focus on the BP oil spill disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. This is already the largest environmental disaster in United States History. Dedicated to the 11 men who lost their lives on April 20th, 2010.






1st Verse:

The wave crests on fire

And storm clouds below

The oozing dark monster



Creeps silently slow

The heartache of many

The future unclear

We stand on the shoreline

Surrounded by fear





Chorus:



There's a hole in the ocean

That's breaking my heart

When will it end

Why did it start?



Can we ever return

To our blue watered bay

There's a hole in the ocean

That stands in our way





2nd Verse:



For the diving birds diving

And the fish 'neath the waves

There is so much to do

There is so much to save



With bitter tears stinging

For the ones who were lost

Is there really a way

To assess what this cost?


Bridge:

Eleven souls sailing

That April day

It happened so quickly

'Twas no time to pray


(You Can) Purchase the MP3 of "A Hole In The Ocean" and help capture the cause: http://aholeintheocean.com -ALL proceeds are going to the Audubon Society's Oil Spill Response Team. There's NO fixed amount! Whatever you can afford! Please show your love for the people in the Gulf region!

Myspace : http://myspace.com/joemontomusics
"Hole in the Ocean" written by Joe Monto & Steve Bartlett
http://www.aholeintheocean.com/
Youtube channel:
http://youtube.com/montomaniac
http://youtube.com/Stemolandmar
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Louisiana's Culture of Fishermen Ponder Future

A Son of the Bayou, Torn Over the Shrimping Life

Jennifer Zdon for The New York Times



Aron Greco took his new fishing boat for a test run in November. Only a few thousand Louisianians now make their living fishing, but Aaron had been drawn to it since childhood.

By AMY HARMON  New York Times

DELACROIX ISLAND, La. — “Hold up, Aaron,” Buddy Greco instructed his son as they bent over a sheet of fiberglass on the docked fishing boat. “You still cuttin’ it wrong.”
His tone on that hot afternoon last June was not unkind. But Aaron, 19, was tired of listening to his father, tired of fixing up the boat for a shrimp season that might never open, tired of wondering whether the future he had set his sights on was dissolving in front of him.
Read Full Story

Top aide to Gov. Bobby Jindal says,..."Oil-impact study may take 20 yrs"

Oil-impact study may take 20 years

But states plan to request money from BP in advance for several recovery projects.

Photo by: Emily Schwarze/Staff 

A brown pelican rests on a pier near the Louisiana Universities

Marine Consortium facility Saturday in Cocodrie. Buy Photo

HOUMA  —  An inventory of environmental impacts from the BP oil spill may take as long as two decades to complete, a top aide to Gov. Bobby Jindal said. But with Louisiana’s deteriorating coast on the line, the state is lining up emergency restoration projects it wants BP to pay for today. Read Full Story

By: Nikki Buskey Staff Writer - Houmatoday.com

Bird's Eye View of Barataria Bay Wetlands

Aerial View of Barataria Bay Area

GULF COAST - Drew Wheelan, ABA Conservation Coordinator, tags along with the Lower Mississippi River and Achafalaya Basin Keepers for a fly over of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Barataria Bay region of coastal Louisiana. South Wings Aviation provided the flight that gave Drew the opportunity to document a "bird's eye view" of the marsh islands that many species of wildlife call home.



Video recorded on day seventy-four of "The Disaster in the Gulf", just after Hurricane Alex passed through the region. The flight goes over several colonies of birds, including Pelicans, Gulls, Herons and Terns that are being hit hard by the oil and mother nature.

PLEASE NOTE: There was a heavy haze that day but Drew's determination carried him through. Thanks Drew for your dedication to help protect our precious wetlands.

Posted on YOUTUBE by AmericanBirding

Smallest victims of the oil spill face an uncertain future.

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert (read more about him)

A baby Kemp's ridley sea turtle, an endangered species, receives care from veterinary technicians after being rescued from oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The turtles are cleaned and rehabilitated at the Audubon Center for the Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans.

JANET McCONNAUGHEY
Associated Press Writer

FORT JACKSON — The smallest victims are the biggest challenge for crews rescuing birds fouled with oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill.

There's no way to know how many chicks have been killed by the oil, or starved because their parents were rescued or died struggling in a slick.
"There are plenty of oiled babies out there," said Rebecca Dmytryk of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, one of the groups working to clean oiled animals.
The lucky ones end up in a cleaning center at Fort Jackson, a pre-Civil War historic site on the Mississippi River delta south of New Orleans.
Pelican chicks often come in cold because oil has matted down the fluffy down that's meant to keep them warm. They must be warmed quickly just to survive long enough to be cleaned. And the youngest must be taught to eat.
"They only know their parents regurgitating food into their mouths. They don't know how to pick stuff up," said Dmytryk, whose organization is working with Tri-State Bird Rescue, a company hired by BP to coordinate animal rescue and cleaning in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
That means tube feeding three times a day. Others, a bit older and accustomed to taking fish from a parent's throat, must be hand-fed until they can eat fish from a bowl.
Adults can be checked a few times a day, but babies needed two staffers' full-time attention to be sure they are eating and are warm.
Many adults and juvenile pelicans get coated with heavy oil diving for fish. That doesn't happen with the chicks, though they may wade into oily puddles or get smeared by oil from their parents' feathers.
In general, rescuers don't go into nesting colonies, said Mike Carloss, a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologist. He said most rescued chicks were near shorelines or were on nests so low that oil washed onto them.
READ COMPLETE STORYY

Marine Toxicologist Warns Chemicals Could Contaminate Air

Chemicals could contaminate air

JENNA FARMER | TRI-PARISH TIMES

Marine Toxicologist, Dr. Riki Ott urges
residents of the Gulf Coast impacted by
the oil spill to develop at "Plan B."

GULF COAST - It's been 21 years since the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and while many of the financial claims still have yet to be laid to rest, many of the clean-up workers who were exposed to toxic chemicals in 1989, have been.

And with more and more Gulf clean-up workers complaining of headaches, sore throats and nausea, Dr. Riki Ott, marine toxicologist and Exxon Valdez survivor, is getting an unwanted wave of déjà vu.

"We got hard hats instead of respirators, just like you," Dr. Ott recalled. "The material safety data sheet for this oil, it says it's a respiratory irritant. It's all concentrated right where the slick hits the surface, so anything that is on that seawater interface is at risk, like dolphins, sea turtles and the workers in their boats trying to respond to this without respirators."
READ COMPLETE STORY

Gulf Oysters Replaced By Rhode Island Calamari

AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

A worker displays a fresh gulf oyster at P&J Oyster Co. in New Orleans Thursday, June 10, 2010. Work is coming to a halt at the 134-year-old establishment after oyster beds were closed because of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Audra D.S. Burch
McClatchy Newspapers

NEW ORLEANS — Celebrity Chef Frank Brigtsen coated the squid in a perfect blend of seasoned cornmeal then dropped the batch into a vat of oil at Charlie's Seafood, a beloved neighborhood joint.

After a lifetime in Louisiana, 38 years as an architect of Creole cuisine inspired by the gifts of the Gulf of Mexico, this was one of the first times he had served diners fried calamari.

Before BP oil's endless flow threatened the supply and upped price of fish and shellfish by up to 30 percent, a hankering for southern fried seafood at this 60-year-old landmark would have yielded a heaping plate of crispy Louisiana oysters.

"'Charlie's is a place that celebrates Louisiana seafood and here I am frying calamari from Rhode Island," says Brigtsen, an award-winning chef who also owns his eponymously named contemporary Creole cuisine restaurant uptown. "I feel like somehow I am betraying my customers by not giving them oysters. I feel like I am wearing someone else's clothes." READ COMPLETE STORY

Louisiana Workforce Commission: Fishermen Job Loss Statistics Unclear

Unemployment Among Fishermen 

Difficult to Measure

	Rodney Pellegrin works in Dulac, La. to attach two sections of  shrimp nets.  Pellegrin said he’s frustrated by how  the fishing waters are opened and  closed so often.

By Kathrine Schmidt 
HOUMA — Following the auto industry implosion of 2008, Detroit’s unemployment rate stands at nearly 30 percent.

But when it comes to sizing up the lost wages and jobs from BP’s catastrophic oil spill to boat captains, deckhands and charter captains in Louisiana, numbers showing the impact on Houma-Thibodaux are much harder to come by.

That’s because many are self-employed and work seasonally, meaning their jobs and income are not tracked by state labor statistics. The state’s Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board doesn’t keep track of that information either, and the Louisiana Workforce Commission did not respond to a request about how they planned to track the job losses. ReadComplete Story            

         

Florida Legal Team Hears Complaints About BP Claims

Florida counties and cities in the path of the Gulf oil spill have not the slightest idea at this point how they could be impacted economically.

Little wonder. Even the state tax collection agency is at a loss, trying to calculate the costs involved in an ever-changing, ever-moving, ever-growing target.

Attorney General Bill McCollum and former attorneys general Bob Butterworth and Jim Smith sought information Tuesday that the state will need to create a process for recouping its losses. The team is gathering information should it seek litigation against BP, which it has not decided to do. The three hoped to come out of the meeting with recommendations about how to refine the claims process.

“We don’t know how long this is going to take,” McCollum told the press before the meeting. “We don’t know the severity of it at the end of the day. What we do know is, we need a process.”

The 26 Florida counties affected need more money and information about the actions the state is taking in compensation for losses from BP, Ginger Delegal, general counsel for the Florida Association of Counties, told the legal team. The claims process has been confusing and lengthy, she said.

Counties have needed to compensate for a change in the claims process that requires them to submit claims directly to BP, instead of submitting them to the state. Two counties have submitted claims this way so far, Delegal said. The change was precipitated by Louisiana parishes that wanted to deal directly with the company. Right now, the counties don’t know if this way works, Delegal said.

Butterworth said state litigation against BP “may be very, very likely,” but the state needs be careful not to get caught in a lengthy legal battle that produces no results.

Smith cautioned claimants not to rush to file lawsuits, as heavy litigation “would get BP to stop working with us.”

READ COMPLETE STORY AT SunshineStateNews.com

Market Fears - Gulf oil spill will put BP into bankruptcy

Stocks fall on fears the Gulf oil

spill will put BP into bankruptcy

The stock market had another late-day slide, this time because offears that the Gulf oil spill will send BP into bankruptcy court.

G. Andrew Boyd / The Times-PicayuneOil from the BP Gulf oil spill stains an inlet on the northeast side of Barataria Bay.

The Dow Jones industrials, up more than 125 points at midday, closeddown 41. Most selling came in the last hour, the third time in fourdays that stocks had a late-day drop.

Investors got a "sell" signal from a news report that quoted ananalyst as saying BP could be forced to seek bankruptcy protection inabout a month because of the oil spill. Analysts also said there wereconcerns that the company might have trouble paying its dividend.

READ MORE at nola.com

Oil Spill touches Native American congregation in Dulac, Louisiana

Wildlife officers prepare to net an oiled pelican in Barataria Bay, La. Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class John Miller, U.S. Coast Guard.

The Rev. Kirby Verret is working all sides of the Gulf Coast oil spill disaster that threatens both his small Louisiana church and his community.

He is trying to tend to his 178-member Native American United Methodist congregation at Clanton Chapel in Dulac, offering support to families and people who fish for a living.

Clanton Chapel United Methodist Church in Dulac, La., is surrounded by water following Hurricane Gustav in 2008.A UMNS file photo by Mike DuBose.

And he is negotiating with British Petroleum, which wants access to the large, centralized sewer system – built after Hurricane Juan in 1985 – on the church’s property and space to house cleanup teams on church grounds.

June 8 marked the 50th day since a BP-owned Deepwater Horizon oil rig ruptured in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and setting the stage for what is feared will be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

The spewing oil has yet to be contained. During a White House press briefing a day earlier, Admiral Thad Allen noted that the nature of the spill has changed. “We’re no longer dealing with a large, monolithic spill; we’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds or thousands of patches of oil that are going a lot of different directions,” he said.

In Dulac, Clanton Chapel is affected by the oil spill. “Our church is mostly fishermen,” Verret explained. “Most are unemployed. Some have gotten work with BP.” 

An oiled pelican is washed at the Clean Gulf Associates Mobile Wildlife Rehabilitation Station in Plaquemines Parish, La. Photo by Spec. 2nd Class Justin Stumberg, U.S. Navy.
read more

A UMNS Report

By Linda Bloom*

2:00 P.M. EST June 9, 2010

Seafood processors face tough choices

Emily Schwarze/Staff

Buy photo

Allen Estay, owner of Bluewater Shrimp in Dulac, stands by empty shrimp baskets Tuesday at his usually bustling shrimp dock. Estay says his business has slowed to about 10 percent of its usual volume this time of year.

HOUMA — They're making decisions one day at a time.
Click to read full story