Three Years After the BP Spill, Tar Balls and Oil Sheen Blight Gulf Coast
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/three-years-after-the-bp-spill-tar-balls-and-oil-sheen-blight-gulf-coast/275139/April 20 marks the three-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which took the lives of 11 men and resulted in the largest oil spill in American history. BP, along with Transocean and Halliburton, are still in the midst of a civil trial held in New Orleans federal court over liability for the catastrophe.
The extent of the damage and the long-term effects from the spill remain impossible to determine. Some scientific evidence -- for example, that collected by NOAA's Damage Assessment, Remediation, and Restoration Program, which includes the results of necropsies of dead sea turtles and dolphins -- is not available, since it is being used as evidence in the trial. Yet even three years later, the residual effects of the oil spill are still apparent on the Gulf Coast. I covered the BP oil spill from the start, and have gone on documenting the effects of the hardest-hit areas in Louisiana and Mississippi, revisiting those areas over the last week. Below are some of the photos I have taken. Along the Mississippi coast one can still find tar balls. In Louisiana I observed, among other disturbing signs of the spill, oil sheen along a coastal marsh, and erosion on an island in Barataria Bay sped up by the death of mangrove trees and marsh grass.
Cat Island was once a rookery for pelicans and other birds. The island is now a fraction of its former size, void of the mangrove trees and healthy marsh grass that thrived there before the spill. The birds that would normally would be nesting this time of the year are also absent. (April 18/All images Julie Dermansky)
Messages from resident in the form of handmade signs remain on Grand Isle. This one offers an optimistic message. (April 14)
Oil sheen is visible in the Bay Jimmy marsh. (April 15)
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You can buy it all over the place, prawns, big prawns. I bought some of them and when I peeled them back I noted a black substance on them. I think it was oil but the store I bought them in swore to me that they were "just fine" and from the gulf of Texas!
They were horrible tasting and I will never and I mean never eat gulf shrimp again. 
Prawns are indeed my favorite food.
No more for me I guess unless they come from north, like Seattle, etc.
& recommend.
and big ones. It makes me incredibly sad too. The whole thing is far from "being over". It will never be "over". The gulf in now indeed a dead zone where life can no longer survive and flourish as it once did.
"Our crystal-clear waters are once again ready for good eating and fun !!"
"Nature has reclaimed our waters"
"The Gulf environment and our businesses are ready for action...YOURS !!
I want to Puke. 
