"The people must come together now to stop this nightmare."

Report from Investigation and Outreach in Waveland, Mississippi

From The Emergency Committee to Stop the Gulf Oil Disaster
July 17th, 2010

Five of us drove out to Waveland, Mississippi on July 14th to investigate and do outreach Investigation/Documentation in Waveland, Mississippi with the Mission Statement. We found oil splattered on the beaches/rocks (see pics attached). There were ‘beach closed’ signs that we passed, but they were not large and there were in fact people swimming at that same beach where we found the oil!

We met a High School biology teacher who grew up in the area and was coming to see the damage the oil had done. She was very troubled by the way people don’t grasp the full environmental scope of this disaster. We gave her the mission statement and suggested she bring this into her classroom when school starts to broaden the discussion of what people can/should do in the face of all this. A cousin of the kids who were swimming told us how shocked she was that they were in the water. She worried about the health/environmental effects of all this and asked to be added to our e-list. A woman who rented out fishing poles on the pier explained to us how hard her business was hit and how she worried about what was going to happen next.

Taking out our Mission in Slidell

We then went on to the same bar in Slidell we went to the week before where a lot of people - mainly from the fishing community - come together for a free crab boil every Wednesday night

People were overall very receptive and in support of the mission of the Emergency Committee...in fact, we were invited to come to a bigger party in the area this weekend to talk to more people about all this! Rose, a woman we met, repeated over and over how great it was that we were there and how grateful she was that we had come to the Gulf from all over the country to help. She explained how her and her daughter were so troubled by the oil spill and had been struggling to figure out how to help with the clean up (they wanted to find a way to help specifically around the oiled animals). She was excited to pass along our information to her daughter who is doing her college thesis on the societal impacts of the spill.

Two women told me how frustrated they were with the government’s incompetence around the spill. They also spoke about their concerns that the clean-up crews were not doing all they could to help.

One man told me how upset he was that he and his son could no longer go fishing like they used to. He was not a commercial fishermen, but talked about what a big part of his life fishing was. Asked what he thought it would take to deal with this catastrophe, he was unsure and pointed to how the both the Democrats and the Republicans are not stepping up to do what’s needed.

We talked to a lot of people, learned a lot, and got out about 150 Mission Statements (also signed a few people up for e-list) in the course of the day.



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