Gulf Flyover Shows Long Road Ahead

I took off with biologist and pilot Tom Hutchings, and Environmental Engineer Joe Taylor from Fairhope's Callahan Airport, Friday June 11.

Hutchings is associated with Southwings, a conservation group made up of volunteer general aviation pilots who are dedicated to showing the world their environment--the good and the bad. Today, it was the bad--the Gulf Oil Spill.

Hutchings took Taylor and me to the source of the spill. We saw what many have already seen--the Deepwater Enterprise ship and two drilling rigs. We also saw a huge tanker that we assumed was collecting the oil BP claims it is diverting with its latest attempt to contain the run-away well.

We flew back toward the coast in a Northeast direction, following the forecast of where the oil was supposed to be. It was there. Eleven miles of the coast of Pensacola there were shrimp boats pulling some type of skimmers--not enough of them to even make a dent in the oil that was there.

But it was along the Alabama shore where the oil was imminent. Tentacles of heavy oil reached out to the shoreline, some making landfall already on West Beach in Gulf Shores. There was plenty more where that came from.

In the converging currents of the Gulf called 'the nipple', the head of an underwater canyon some 35 miles south of Pensacola, we saw swirling sargassum or sea grass, contaminated by oil. It's the same place Hutchings confirmed two dead dolphins on Wednesday June 9--possibly more. There were no dead mammals today but there was oil soaked sargassum.