for Lucas No. 1. It was raining when I got there. On a wide, soggy lawn, a stone obelisk stood cold and lonely in the damp. I read the engraving on its base:
ON THIS SPOT, ON THE TENTH DAY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, A NEW ERA IN CIVILIZATION BEGAN.
But someone should carve that obelisk a footnote. This was not, in fact, the spot where it all happened. The obelisk had been moved from the original site when the ground began to subside. This was merely the front lawn of the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum.
It’s not a bad museum, otherwise. They have built an entire replica boomtown village, and next to the obelisk, there is a life-size replica of the Lucas No. 1 oil derrick, fitted with a large nozzle, as if from a fire hose. For a hundred dollars, I was told, you can have this nozzle turned on, and it will spray water at the same pressure and to the same height as the original Lucas Gusher. Oil companies sometimes bring new hires there to celebrate.
As for the actual Lucas Gusher, it’s about a mile south of here, on private land. The Spindletop oil field has been designated a national historic landmark, but it’s also designated
The oil that once came from Spindletop now comes from more remote oilfields, or from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico, or is imported by tanker from overseas. One day it may come, by pipeline, from Alberta. In any case, the refineries of Port Arthur are tied less to the people living outside their fence lines than they are to the distant sources that keep them humming.
But in Southeast Texas, oil sustains more than refineries. Its nourishment spreads out through circle upon circle of lesser players that cluster and compete at the oasis of its wealth, living off its power and success—and even off its disasters.
On January 23, 2010, an oil tanker called the
While the age of gushers is long past, there is still occasion in Port Arthur for the unplanned flow of petroleum. As the
On the other hand, we’re talking about 2 percent of more than 23 million gallons of cargo. It was the largest oil spill Texas had seen in two decades.
As with an oil find, so with an oil spill: for as long as it lasts, it is a source of work. On Spindletop, that meant on and off for decades. In the case of the
An oil spill is a boon of sorts even to environmental activists, whether as additional motivation or as convincing, public proof of an issue’s importance. The threat of poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas from the spill prompted a short evacuation of downtown Port Arthur—a fact that had already become another arrow for Hilton Kelley to shoot at the refinery companies.
It might not be the most efficient way to extract value from oil, but the fact remains that a spill is not only a spill. It’s a massive carcass, which we gather around to eat.
At my hotel, the parking lot was crowded with trucks bearing the logos of companies like Clean Harbors and Oil Mop LLC. I was not the only one who had chosen the Ramada: the Coast Guard had set up its spill response headquarters in one of the conference rooms. Khaki-wearing men strode in and out of the lobby with an air of can- do seriousness. At its height, the cleanup had put something like two thousand people to work, but now things were winding down, and the mood was almost festive.
“I hear you’re leaving us,” said the hotel manager to a passing cleanup contractor.
“Well, maybe we’ll be back,” said the contractor.
“For the next oil spill?” called a woman from behind the check-in desk.
In the empty hotel restaurant, I met with Jeremy Hansen and Bryan Markland, two well-scrubbed Coast Guard officials working on the cleanup effort. “You’ve got all these local cleanup contractors poised to jump,” Hansen said. “It’s cutthroat.”
Markland told me that cleanup contractors often begin their work even without being hired, confident that if they do the work, someone will have to pay for it. And so skimmer boats materialize, hungry for oil, and lines of floating containment boom sprout to cordon it off, and the cleanup’s economics bloom.
It is discouraging, though, to reflect on how little even an effective cleanup can achieve. “Most oil spills, if you get more than 15 percent of the oil recovered, you’re doing good,” Markland said. “We think we’re up in the 30 percent range on this.” The rest of a spill, he told me, simply evaporates or disperses to what he called an
Hansen was sitting back, his arms crossed. He looked a little mischievous.
“Did you see the Port Arthur slogan?” he asked.
I laughed. I
Hansen smiled and shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a good thing they don’t,” he said. “Or it would be a lot harder to clean up.”
Then there was Rhonda, the grumpy pelican lady. She was in charge of rescuing and rehabilitating birds oiled by the spill. A bustling woman in a salmon-colored shirt exploding with pockets, she struck me as deeply unsentimental about her work, and she didn’t hide her annoyance that I was interested in it. Had I been naive to imagine that the bird savior of record would share a little enthusiasm for bird saving? But Rhonda was no simple bird lover. She was the director of Wildlife Response Services LLC—just one more contractor providing post-spill services.
“What is it you want, exactly?” she asked.
Eventually she resigned herself to my presence, and soon we were standing in the corner of a cavernous warehouse, staring at a pelican. Miraculously, only nine birds had been oiled in the spill: a loon, a cormorant, a seagull, a spotted sandpiper, a black-crowned night heron, and four pelicans. With one exception, they had all been released back to the wild after being cleaned, fed, and housed until they were back in fighting form. The lone holdover was a brown pelican now living in a plywood pen with a sheet over it, in a temporary rehabilitation center downtown.
A rehab worker raised the corner of the sheet and the three of us peered through the narrow opening. I held my breath. Inside, lit with the radiant orange glow of a heat lamp, the single pelican sat motionless on a low perch, a Buddha with folded wings.
“He’ll puke if you pick him up,” Rhonda said. She was advising the rehab worker not to let the pelican take a test swim yet. “You can’t mess with them when they eat.”
It had been a rough century for pelicans on the Gulf Coast. A hundred years earlier, fishermen had gotten the idea that pelicans were competing with them, and had slaughtered them wholesale. Worse still, by the 1950s, our release of pesticides into the environment had become a two-pronged machine of pelicanic destruction: DDT
