Robin's Blog for Dauphin Island

Trip to Gulf by EIU group reveals human side of oil spill disaster

By JIM VOREL - H&R Staff Writer | Posted: Sunday, July 4, 2010 12:01 am

CHARLESTON - The continuing Deepwater Horizon oil spill already has become the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, and yet it can be difficult for the average Central Illinois resident to grasp the full impact of the disaster or separate fact from fiction.

For some, like Eastern Illinois University geography instructor Cameron Craig, it was easier to simply go see for himself. But rather than just make the trip out of curiosity, Craig decided to bring three of his students along to document their research. By the time the team returned a mere three days later, they had radically changed their perspective on the disaster.

Craig and his three-person team, which included grad students Zach Nugent, Michael Gismondi and A.J. Schubert, left for the Gulf Coast on June 17 and returned in the early morning hours of June 21.

Craig, a documentary filmmaker who has worked in settings such as Yellowstone National Park documenting the interaction of the human and natural world, is planning a full-length documentary on the oil spill, focusing on the "human impact" of the disaster, beyond the shots of devastation replayed on 24-hour news networks. In preparation, he collected questions from his students, documenting what information they would want to learn from the people of the Gulf Coast.

"I wanted to be objective and give my students a clear view of their place in the world," Craig said. "Obviously, we didn't have the resources to go to every community along the coast, so we went specifically to the locations suggested to us by the people living there, telling us about the areas that had been most affected. We let the people tell us where they were hurting most."

What the team found, however, was surprising to them. After arriving, they realized how conditioned their expectations had been to find coasts covered in oil and dead sea life littering the beach.

Instead, try as they might, there was no oil to be found. The seaside hotels had repelled any encroaching oil without much difficulty through use of floating "containment booms," and surface skimmers had collected the rest. To find those more severely affected, Craig and the students would have to look elsewhere.

The team met with scientists and researchers who had studied the oil's movements and affects on the gulf, and were directed to Dauphin Island, a small island and town located off the coast of Mobile County, Ala. The town's population had been severely affected by the spill, and not solely in an ecological sense.

"A lot of the coastal community is dependent on fishing and tourism, and the people of Dauphin Island are particularly dependent on the tourists from the mainland who rent small cottages on the seaside," Craig said. "Their yearly income comes from these three months, and they had lost the majority of their reservations."

Despite the beaches of Dauphin Island being free from oil, public perception of the oil spill as universal to the gulf had severely hurt the economy of the island's residents. Craig said he believes the portrayal of the spill in the traditional media has not given American citizens an accurate picture of both the damages and cleanup efforts related to the spill.

"Our preconceived ideas are not all true," he said. "We see images of oil and gloom and doom, and use this one image to describe the whole coast. The result is reacting too quickly without critically thinking on what actually affects these communities. The spill's environmental damage was bad enough, but by losing their tourism business when there is no actual hazard, these people suffer twice."

Craig's students were affected deeply by what they saw in seaside communities like Dauphin Island. Zach Nugent, an EIU graduate student and television anchor for WEIU, called the trip a once-in-a-lifetime experience to understand firsthand how people were affected by the disaster.

"The economy of these communities really took a massive hit, which is especially unfortunate when it is unwarranted," Nugent said. "On Dauphin Island, one person we spoke with said they had over 200 cancellations, and cancellations all the way into September and October. For these people, the threat of the oil has been almost as damaging as the oil itself. It's a double whammy."

Nugent and fellow WEIU reporter Michael Gismondi will produce a series of programming to air on WEIU that will share some of their findings with their fellow students. Craig, meanwhile, already is sharing his uncut documentary footage in class. He hopes to have the documentary ready to air by the fall.

Overall, Craig and the three students left the Gulf Coast feeling increasingly positive about actions being taken to deal with the spill.

"The Gulf of Mexico is not dead, and every researcher we spoke with believed that it will continue to thrive," Craig said. "The impact has been substantial and will continue to be, but the cleanup has been effective as well. Our perception changed."

Nugent agreed that his perception had been changed but added that the highest priority still had to be stopping the flow of further oil into the gulf.

"This trip gave me a much better picture of what was going on," he said. "It is a great tragedy, but not to the extent that I thought. I was able to see the relative success of cleanup efforts. The biggest frustration for both myself and everyone involved is that the leak still hasn't been stopped, but thanks to this trip I am hopeful for the future."

jvorel@herald-review.com|421-7973