Oil Spill

First, let me just say that we have had an amazing trip. I have taken well over 300 pictures in less that 24 hours! I decided to share some of them in groups. I just could not see posting the oil along with our happy trip pictures. There is no way you can grasp what it is like if I mix the pictures.

I want to share this with all of you who may not be able to come down. Someone has already told me they were waiting for the post because their pictures of the oil did not do it justice. Your mood should at least be somber after viewing this.

So we arrived late Thursday night. Friday morning, I took these from our balcony.

I would say that from a distance, it looked much like really bad seaweed. There were large brown patches on the beach and the water was a little brown as the waves broke.

What I did not really think about was that I was looking at a lot of beach from 7 or 8 stories in the air. I will admit,that Justin and I both thought that maybe it was not as bad as we expected.

Here you can see a "slick" out in the water.

Around 7am the clean-up crews began to arrive.

FYI, in Gulf Shores, AL double red flags indicate that the water is CLOSED. Swimming while double red flags are posted is illegal and you can be arrested.

Once I got down to the beach {and saw this} my heart just sank. It was all too real to me now. There were millions of these "tarballs." As best I understand it, when the oil is out in the cold water it forms "balls" but once these hit the beach and warms up, they look like these globs. This may be a horrible analogy, but if you have ever see chicken, duck, or geese poo, it looked like that. Some were dime-sized while some were the size of dinner plates.

That is a child's beach toy.

This is what is left behind when the surf hits the sand. This is impossible to clean up.

There were several of these crews along the beach. As I type, it is 11pm and there are crews still out there working with lights. They set up these huge rolls of "garbage bags" and go to work shoveling the tar and sand up. That huge tractor would take the filled bags down the beach to a pickup location. I am not sure where they took them after that.

I'm sure at least one person will call us bad parents for letting the kids go out on the beach. I thought it was so important that they see what had happened. They have a lot of background on the oil rig and the spill. They were both very quite and they concentrated on where to step to avoid the oil. Carys was absolutely heartbroken at how the water looked and that she could not go in the ocean.

We managed to find a place where the kids could sit and play in the sand for a while. They discovered that no matter how careful you are, if you go on the beach, you WILL get oil on you.

These crews worked in shifts. We were told that they only work for 20 minutes at a time and then swap and break and do that all over again. It is very hot and humid and they faced a daunting task. We watched them work all day, and I would say {this is my guess} they cleaned about 200-300 yards of beach that will be covered again in the morning after high tide.

From the balcony I could not put into perspective exactly how much of the beach was covered in oil. It was a lot.

This is one of the saddest pictures to me. This is a shot of the public beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. On a Friday morning the weekend of the Fourth of July. I am not sure if there were any other people out there or not. So sad. It did pick up a little bit later in the day, but still it was no where near a normal sized crowd.

More Tar Balls

The clean-up.
You have to SCRUB the oil off with soap. Justin took a great deal of time cleaning Carys and Sawyer's feet, but later in their baths they still had a tint to the bottoms of their feet. I scrubbed more and {just so you will not think we neglected them} they are completely clean now!

Here is another slick that you could see mid-day.

Helicopters flew all day. Before we could really see the above slick from our balcony, this crew arrived to try and keep it from coming ashore.

The remainder of these pics are from the Mobile Bay from Fort Morgan.

Here is an oil rig in the bay. Although the kids had seen pictures online and on the TV, it was great for them to get to see a real rig so that they could understand the accident and why the oil was leaking. There was a LOT of oil in the bay out here. It was very sad. We stood on the pier and just looked. The grandeur of how vast the bay looked and how broad and area that was {and will be} impacted is just well, sad.

Also at Fort Morgan we met a crew working on clean-up efforts. They were making absorbent contraptions {for lack of a better word!} They had these large cotton pads and they layered the pads and some sort of screen. {Ladies, these absorbent pads looked like mattress pads for a king sized bed.}

Here you can see the contraption.

Please pray for the people on the coast. Pray that an answer to the actual leak will come soon. Looking at the oil, it was easy to forget that it is still leaking. This is not the last oil that this area will see. Pray for the clean up crews, the local business owners, and everyone involved.

Other than praying, making a trip down and supporting the businesses of the affected areas is the best thing you could do.

P.S. This is the longest post I've ever compiled!