By Marian Wang
Estimating oil flow from BP’s ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico has consistently been a subject of contention among the oil company, the government and the skeptics who believe that official estimates significantly low-ball the scale of the disaster.
By Marian Wang
At the time, it was the worst oil spill the United States had ever seen.
It was 1989, and Merle Savage, then a healthy 50-year-old, had heard the news about Exxon Valdez. Compelled to help, she spent four months cleaning up Alaska’s oil-contaminated waters and shores.
She has never been the same since. Now 71, Savage still feels the toll that summer took on her health, but as she watches the reports coming out of the Gulf, she’s felt something else: Déjà vu.
This story was co-produced by Feet in Two Worlds and El Diario/La Prensa.
NEW ORLEANS — Federal immigration officials have been visiting command centers on the Gulf Coast to check the immigration status of response workers hired by BP and its contractors to clean up the immense oil spill.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Louisiana confirmed that its agents had visited two large command centers—which are staging areas for the response efforts and are sealed off to the public—to verify that the workers there were legal residents.
“We visited just to ensure that people who are legally here can compete for those jobs—those people who are having so many problems,” said Temple H. Black, a spokesman for ICE in Louisiana.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, thousands of Hispanic workers, many of them undocumented, flocked to the region to help in the reconstruction of Louisiana’s coastal towns. Many stayed, building communities on the outskirts of New Orleans or finding employment outside the city in oil refineries and in the fishing industry.