Skimmers, Oil, Corexit and Captain Dave (ThePumpHandle)

Out in the Oil with Captain Dave

Category: BP • Environmental Health • Occupational Health & Safety
Posted on: July 8, 2010 2:41 PM, by The Pump Handle

By Elizabeth Grossman

"I've never seen anything like it," says David Willman, who has nearly 15 years' experience captaining supply boats that support oil rigs and drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. "We're seeing pods of whales and dolphins out in the oil and lots of dead things," he tells me. "Things I've never seen before coming up from the deep that look like sea cucumbers floating dead. Man o' wars floating dead with shriveled tentacles." Willman is captain of the Noonie G., an 111-foot supply boat owned by Guilbeau Marine, a company based in Cut Off, LA. He's been working out of Venice, Louisiana for about ten years ferrying fuel, water, and other supplies to offshore oil operations.

He's not the only one seeing oiled and dead sea life: A research team from Texas A&M University out on the Gulf in June also reported what looked to be hundreds of dead sea cucumbers but were actually invertebrates in the tunicate family that are important to the marine food web. Other research teams have seen dead man o' war jellyfish as well.

"We had just finished working for Apache [an oil company working in the Gulf] when the Deepwater Horizon sank and my company got a call from AMPOL [American Pollution Control Corporation]," Willman tells me. "A skimming unit and oil recovery pump was put on our boat," he explains. Since late April, he and his wife, who works as his deckhand, along with a rotating crew of four to five, have been working out within 5 miles of the Deepwater Horizon site. Typically they're out on the water for two to three weeks at a time, then off for a week.

(AMPOL, an environmental services company based in Iberia, LA has apparently been engaged by the Marine Spill Response Corporation (MSRC). MSRC is a non-profit company formed after the Exxon Valdez oil spill to provide "oil spill response services," among them aircraft to spray dispersant, skimmers, boom, barges, and communications equipment. MSRC is funded by the Marine Preservation Association and its member companies, of which BP is one.)

When I speak to Willman the boat is docked for repairs. Tropical Storm Alex has just blown through and the water is still too rough for skimming.

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