NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) – Sunday (April 20) marks 15 years since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
It took 87 days to cap the BP-operated Macondo well, during which time millions of barrels of crude oil poured into the Gulf and onto Louisiana’s coast.
Among the hardest-hit areas was Cat Island, not a single island, but a string of small land masses in Plaquemines Parish’s Cat Bay. Once a vital nesting ground for birds, including Louisiana’s state bird, the brown pelican, the island chain has now all but disappeared beneath the waves.
“There’s no good time for an oil spill, but it couldn’t have been at a worse time,” said P.J. Hahn, who served as coastal director for Plaquemines Parish at the time of the disaster.
It was nesting season. Brown pelicans had only been removed from the federal endangered species list five months earlier. Hahn recalled how the sky over Cat Island once looked like a cloud, not of weather, but of birds.
“Like a cloud, a blue sky, but it was a cloud of birds,” he said.
Hahn helped rescue oil-slicked birds, but many that flew off returned to their nests, contaminating eggs and chicks with crude.
“That was just wiping out so many birds on that island,” he said.
Even before the spill, Cat Island was fragile, battered by erosion and rising seas. But Hahn is convinced the oil hastened its collapse. Once the vegetation died, nothing held the land together.
“It was gone in no time after that,” he said.
The evidence was visible from space. Satellite imagery in July 2010 showed oil booms ringing Cat Island. On the ground, Hahn and others watched as entire chunks disappeared, seemingly overnight.
In 2013, a PVC pipe was still marked where birds once nested. It was now 75 feet offshore.
Despite efforts to save it, including millions raised by Hahn for restoration, the island was written off.
“We actually went out to get a permit to restore that,” he said. “The state, unfortunately, decided they were going to write that island off.”
Even some coastal scientists agreed it was too late.
But the disaster had an ironic outcome: billions in penalties paid by BP and its partners poured into coastal restoration. Louisiana received $9 billion in settlements and fines. The money rebuilt barrier islands and marshlands with sand equivalent to multiple Superdomes.
Queen Bess Island, a few miles from Cat Bay, was one of the success stories. Once shredded by storms and shrinking, it was expanded from five to 30 acres thanks to a $19 million restoration project funded through the BP settlements.
“There’s not very many brown pelican colonies left in Louisiana,” said Todd Baker, project manager for the Queen Bess rebuild. “So, to invest in one of the few that we have left is huge.”
The funding arrived at a pivotal moment. Following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the state established the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), which had already developed a science-based master plan to guide restoration efforts.
That plan proved critical when federal officials began distributing BP settlement funds.
“When Louisiana had that science-based plan put forward, people trusted us, what we were saying, what we wanted for Louisiana’s future,” said Simone Maloz of Restore the Mississippi River Delta. “And they helped us to use that money to make those investments.”
Still, not every site could be saved. And not every plan is moving forward.
The largest project funded through the settlement, a major river diversion intended to use the Mississippi River’s sediment to rebuild marshland, has been paused. The Landry administration says it is working on a lower-cost alternative that it claims will protect fisheries.
Fifteen years on, the oil is gone, but the wounds it left to land, wildlife, and people still linger.
