[Salon] The Truth Behind the Spin: What BP doesn’t want you to know about the Gulf Oil Spill
By Lindsay Abrams; Original Post at Salon
The energy company insists the Gulf has recovered. The people who live there say it still has a long way to go.
The best time to find tarballs on Louisiana’s shorelines is directly after a thunderstorm, when the waves churn up the oil carpeting the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and deposit its weathered remnants onto the beach.
That’s according to Jonathan Henderson, and he should know – he’s been tracking tar for four years now, ever since the day, back in April 2010, when he took his first flight over the Gulf of Mexico to survey the plume of oil shooting out from BP’s Macondo Prospect. He’s taken some 200 trips since. These days, he tends to travel to Grand Isle State Park and Elmer’s Island. The oil no longer covers those places, as it once did, but despite what you may have heard about the cleanup being complete, fresh tarballs keep reappearing. Especially after storms, Henderson’s liable to find them by the thousands.