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DEEPWATER HORIZON: TEN YEARS LATER
TEN YEARS LATER
The end of a fishing day is a natural time for reflection. So with the evening sun slipping lower and bathing the Louisiana coastal marsh in golden light, it seemed fitting for Captain Mike Frenette to wax philosophic on four decades of fishing one of the Gulf of Mexico’s most productive estuaries.
“I’ve seen a lot of changes, but it’s still an incredible fishery,” Frenette said. “I still love going to work every day. You get to see things that most people go their whole lives and never see. It never gets old.”
The previous few hours of fishing made Frenette’s point. Our objective was redfish, a species that’s emblematic of this coast and its people—strong, tough, adaptive, and resilient—but we spent most of the afternoon casting flies to jack crevalle that maliciously herded big schools of menhaden. Things got more interesting when bull sharks showed up to the dinner party, smashing through the middle of the baitfish schools while the jacks judiciously turned their attention to the outer edges. At one point the entire piscine spectacle drifted under Frenette’s boat to offer an intimate glance into the feeding habits of large predatory fish.
by Trey Reid
We rotated between three menhaden schools in an area the size of four football fields, casting into the fray when we found more jacks than sharks. Nearing the appointed time to head back to Frenette’s lodge at Venice Marina, I hooked up with my fourth jack of the afternoon and the sixth in two days. The previous five had been lost to equipment failure or angler error, but I was still optimistic. The fish made a series of punishing runs and stripped a good portion of backing off the reel. Roughly 45 minutes into the engagement, with the backing recovered and the fly line back inside the guides, the rod started shaking violently. Thirty yards away a plume of red water roiled the surface as the 9-weight went sickeningly slack. “With as many sharks as we’ve seen here, I’m surprised you had it on as long as you did,” Frenette said. “I think we’re fighting a losing battle today.”
The outcome was frustrating and disappointing, but it was still a hell of a day. And it was a radically different experience from the last time I was in a boat with Frenette.
I met Frenette in June 2010, in the midst of what has been called the worst environmental disaster in US history. I was on assignment for ESPN.com to report on the BP oil spill and its effects on recreational fishing. Following a complex series of mechanical failures and human errors, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded April 20, 2010, killing 11 people. Situated 41 miles off the Louisiana coast and nearly a mile deep, the ruptured well that caused the catastrophe sent an estimated 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the next three months. The oil slick spanned more than 57,000 square miles and soiled an estimated 1,100 miles of coastline from Louisiana to Florida. The small town of Venice, located at the end of Louisiana Highway 23 about 75 miles southeast of New Orleans, was the epicenter for the spill response. It’s also home to Frenette’s Redfish Lodge of Louisiana, established 1985, the first fishing lodge at Venice Marina.
The fishing and oil industries are the dual engines that drive Venice’s economy. It’s an unincorporated community, population 202, that’s the last outpost of civilization before the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf, a jumping-off point for inshore and offshore fishing trips as well as oil platforms.
In June 2010, Venice was crawling with officials from every government agency imaginable. Charter captains and commercial anglers used their boats to carry workers and absorbent oil booms to the coastline. News media from across the globe had erected makeshift sets in any free space between fishing camps and the surrounding marsh. Frenette, a past president of the Venice Charter Boat and Guides Association, was idled by fishing closures and was spending more time in front of TV cameras than in the bow of his Triton. His appearances included NBC’s Today show, National Public Radio, Fox Business, MSNBC, Reuters and The New York Times. One day he appeared on a live shot for The Situation Room with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and later recorded another CNN interview with Anderson Cooper.
Frenette and I spent a day following then-Louisiana Governer Bobby Jindall and a swarm of media to see where crude oil was washing ashore near Pass a Loutre and Redfish Bay. A week later, Frenette was in a hearing room in the US Capitol to testify about the spill and its effect on his livelihood before the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
“I’m losing everything I’ve worked for,” Frenette told me one evening during the ongoing disaster. “I’m losing my way of life. This year is shot. We know that. But are we talking one year, three years, ten years before things get back to normal? That’s the scariest thing about this. We’re on the brink of disaster here.”
Frenette lost an entire year of business because of fishing closures, but now, a decade after the spill, his life and business have mostly
returned to normal, although he says he used most of his retirement savings to stay afloat. And while the spill caused significant damage to specific sites along the coast, including loss of marine and bird life and significant habitat degradation, the widespread systemic crash of fish populations that many feared didn’t materialize.
“As far as an obvious crash as a result of the oil spill, nothing points to that,” said Jason Adriance, finfish program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “With redfish, there’s been no noticeable issue with that stock. There just doesn’t appear to be some big crash.”
But the BP oil spill didn’t happen in a vacuum, and the scope of the disaster can only be understood in the context of the long, enduring struggle to protect Louisiana’s fragile coastline and marsh against recurrent disasters both natural and manmade.
“We’ve certainly had our troubles,” said Chris Macaluso, director of the Center for Marine Fisheries for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “When the oil spill hit, we were just kind of still coming out of some very powerful hurricanes: Katrina, Rita, Ike, and Gustav. The commercial and recreational fishermen were just coming back and getting their feet under them again, and then the oil spill hit.”
It was the latest in a string of calamities to befall the coastline of a state that calls itself the “Sportsman’s Paradise.” Louisiana loses land at the rate of a football field an hour, and since the 1930s the state has lost about 2,000 square miles of coastal land, an area roughly
equivalent to Delaware. The causes are numerous and intertwined. After the Great Flood of 1927, Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to build levees along the Mississippi River, and while they had the desired effect of preventing destructive floods, there were deleterious consequences. It cut the mighty river off from its delta, preventing the massive sediment loads from spreading across the river basin and rebuilding land. The problem was exacerbated after the discovery of oil and natural gas along Louisiana’s coast in the 1930s. Oil companies dredged thousands of miles of canals for exploration and infrastructure. Hundreds of miles of navigation channels added to the problem by allowing water to eat away at the land and speed erosion.
Without the Mississippi naturally flooding and replenishing its delta, southern Louisiana has been steadily sinking for decades. When powerful hurricanes make landfall from the Gulf, there’s now less land to dampen their surge, which in turn causes additional land loss. Throw in the growing threat of rising sea levels— according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, southern Louisiana has the highest relative rate of sea-level rise in the US—and the outlook dims even more.
For Frenette and others who fish and live on the Louisiana coast, the problems aren’t abstract. Cruising out of one of the many distributary bayous leading from the big river to the Gulf during our June fishing trip, Frenette pointed to a spot where just 20 years ago the land stretched 2 miles toward a distant oil platform;
today it’s all open water. Two weeks after the relatively weak Tropical Storm Cristobal made landfall in the area, the edge of the marsh appeared as if a track hoe had scraped away huge chunks—2 feet of raw black dirt left where marsh grasses stood a fortnight before. Cristobal also put more than a foot of water over the parking lot at Frenette’s lodge at Venice Marina and the highway leading into town.
“They just built the highway up another couple of feet after Katrina,” Frenette said. “You have to wonder if the government is going to think it’s worth the cost to keep raising it at some point.”
But hope remains in the form of a grand environmental irony. After years of making plans to stem the rising tide of coastal erosion, Louisiana officials are bringing some of those plans to fruition by using oil spill fines and penalties paid by BP and others.
“Restoration work has been ongoing for a long time,” Macaluso said. “Prior to the spill money coming in, you saw small projects, little projects here and there that cost $20 million, $30 million. That seems big, but it was just enough to keep us above water. Now we’re starting to see $100 million, $150 million, $200 millionscale projects, rebuilding entire beaches and entire barrier islands as opposed to little chunks here and there. Don’t get me wrong. The spill was an incredibly destructive event and an unprecedented environmental catastrophe. But our conservation leaders and anglers have stayed firm in making sure the money is put to good use.” Louisiana’s Coastal Restoration Master Plan also calls for construction of sediment diversions, which would create cuts in the Mississippi River levee to divert sediment-laden water into the marsh to restore natural connections and allow the river to replenish the delta.
“The primary reason the system is broken is the lack of sediment,” Macaluso said. “There hasn’t been a single scientific study in 50 years that hasn’t come to the conclusion that we need to put suspended sediment from the Mississippi River back in the system. If we put an annual slug of sediment back in there, it’s enough to stop subsidence and help with sea level rise.”
People in Louisiana carry a fierce independent streak. Combine that with the state’s history of political corruption and you have the ingredients for a lack of consensus on fixing the problems. The complexity and enormity of the issues further complicate matters.
A 2019 study by Louisiana State University professor Eugene Turner published in Restoration Ecology suggests two older diversion structures, one that went operational in 1991 and the other in 2002, actually resulted in net loss of land. Proponents counter that a pair of planned structures that would divert river sediment into Breton Sound and Barataria Bay will operate on a much larger scale (their estimated cost is between $2 billion and $4 billion) and move much more sediment to replenish the delta. But that brings up another issue: Opponents of fresh water diversion argue that moving that much fresh water into the system will harm saltwaterdependent fisheries.
“Diversions have to be a part of the solution,” Macaluso said. “We need to have the ability to be adaptive in operating them. It’s a dynamic system. It’s supposed to change. Of course, there are detractors, and they’re becoming organized. Folks have told us, ‘We will not accept you putting that much fresh water back in the system.’ But the political will is strong, the scientific evidence is there, and now the money is there.”
There’s no disagreement that coastal Louisiana is a special place that needs restoration and conservation.
“It’s still the best place in the United States to go fishing,” said Adriance, the LDWF biologist.
“This is the estuary,” Frenette said, sweeping his hands wide to demonstrate the scale of the massive system. “It’s the nursery for the shrimp, the crabs, the finfish—all of it. If we lose it, we lose everything.”
Trey Reid has written for numerous newspapers, magazines, and websites, and is a former field reporter for ESPN. He works in public and media relations for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, producing and hosting the agency’s television show, Arkansas Wildlife. He also hosts the outdoor radio show, The Wild Side on 103.7 FM The Buzz in Little Rock, which can also be heard as a podcast.
