The state's struggle to deal with the remains of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill can be seen in miniature in a broken stand of roseau cane in Pass a Loutre Wildlife Management Area, Wildlife & Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham said Tuesday morning. When Barham scooped up a handful of earth, what oozed from between his fingers was a mixture of soil and oil. "They made an attempt to try and clip some of this grass and make it grow, but it looks nothing like it did a year ago," Barham said of the cane stand along the pass. "It was a thick, luscious, green, tropical marsh, and now you see a very weathered, stressed, unhealthy marsh situation," he said. "It won't be long before a lot of this is in water." Indeed, wildlife agents hammered poles of plastic pipe along the water's edge in the days after the spill, and since then, the shoreline has retreated several yards. The ooze of oil came from beneath the ground. There, it mixed with the roots of the cane stalks that had sprung to life after an original die-back and are now turning brown again. Barham and Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority Chairman Garret Graves were leading a ...
↧
