[wp_geo_map]Along side Lost Sole 360 you will see the infamous and insidious BP oil spill tar balls
I am sure many of you have been hearing this term for some time now, and probably wondered what a tar ball is exactly. First off, it looks much like a pile of dog crap and has the same consistency ( sadly I know this because I have picked up a ton of it because of Jack and Jinjer). While walking the water’s edge where most of them accumulate I spotted Lost Sole #360. When I knelt down to get a good angle in what appeared to be clean sand, only to find out the just below the surface, perhaps a quarter of an inch was a layer of tar! In the process I also used my elbow to prop the camera and it too had nasty brown tar on it when I lifted it up. I was disgusted, I could not believe this was a hazard that I had to encounter on our once pristine beaches.
I now know what they are talking about when they described on TV when trying to remove it. It was near impossible to get off, I had to rub and rub. It did burn, but not from the substance itself, but rather from taking off 5 layers of skin trying to remove the crud. I also got it all over my flip flops and tracked it into the van which I did not realize until I got home AARRRGGGH!!! I got it on my shorts also which needed turpentine to remove.
On the drive home I got very angry about all of this. Mostly about the lip service BP and the Govt. has been giving us. They do not seem to be doing anything to clean this up. I saw no crews, no boats, no nothing out there right now! And those workers only work now under the cover of darkness and only in the highly visible areas of the beach for the TV crews and politicians to see. This is such crap!
And how is it that a foreign oil company can drill on what seems to me should be U.S. soil? And when that destroy our coastline and the economy that depends on it, that can just red tape us to death.
Take for instance, today, in the local newspaper I read where a claim submitted to BP by Escambia County was returned with a letter stating that they could not process the claim because they could not reach a working phone number. The claim was filed on Escambia County letterhead for Christ’s sake!! And then when an official from Escambia tried to call a hotline number, all he got was a voice message with no opportunity to leave a message of his own. I mean i the county Govt. can’t get reimbursed. how in the world is the small businesses going to get their claims processed!!!
I am just so pissed about it all I could, to quote a good friend, “rip my own ears off!”
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