Summer Vacation
September 17th, 2010
DAUPHIN ISLAND, AL. | JULY 4, 2010 : A cleanup worker punctuates an otherwise typical beach scene.
Just days after Memorial Day, the traditional start of summer, oil was spewing virtually unchecked from the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico.
The disaster wrought by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig had taken the lives of 11 men, and its associated negative publicity had unleashed economic hardship on the people of the Gulf Coast.
On the Sunday before the summer solstice, the Chronicle launched a series titled Voices of the Gulf. Eight Chronicle columnists fanned out across the Gulf Coast to tell the stories of what was deemed one of the worst environmental disasters in our nation’s history.
As the lone photographer assigned to produce photographs for the series, I logged some serious miles crisscrossing an area from Corpus Christi all the way to Key West, covering some 10,000 miles in the 28 days I spent in the field. The spill stories became what I did with my summer (not) vacation.
Geotag Map of Spill Photos
Precious little of that time was spent making photographs, of course. Most of the time was spent driving (5,469 miles at the wheel) or on commercial aircraft (2,311 miles flown). However, some of these miles yielded real photo opportunities, like the 665 miles aboard a NOAA research ship, or the nearly 1,500 miles flown on a variety of government or industry airplanes and helicopters.
For the record, in all these travels I saw only four instances of spilled oil. But the effects of the spill could be seen everywhere I looked.
Surreal beach scenes, idled oilfield workers, huddled oiled birds, irate residents, weary cleanup workers, abandoned house pets and literally thousands of miles of protective booms form a portrait of the summer of 2010. A lost summer for those who live and work on the Gulf Coast.
By mid-summer, BP had capped the gusher, and the armies of cleanup workers and media had mostly moved on. But the photos from the summer form a survey of the Gulf region and an essay on the lost summer.
The resulting story is told through photo galleries and blog posts on the Chronicle Photo Department’s Blog, so please check it out. I’ll republish the highlights here at a later date.
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