The Bucket Brigade

Today our trio had an exciting meeting with the Bucket Brigade's volunteer coordinator, Clayton Shelvin. A performing arts major, he was thrown into the oil fiasco shortly after taking the job. He and the other Bucket Brigade members face the challenge of managing a flood of eager volunteers with a small staff team, and a newfound spotlight put on them from news sources around the country.

The Bucket Brigade started as a grassroots effort to monitor air quality near oil refineries through citizen reporting. Residents downwind of refineries are given special buckets to gather air samples to send in for testing. It gives communities a sense of power to be able to hold the companies populating "cancer alley" accountable for their emissions. It's one thing to say, "Our air isn't clean" - it's another thing entirely to lay a printout in front of a oil executive and point out that their emissions of Hydrogen Sulfide are twenty-five times higher than the legal limit.

Since the oil began flowing, the Bucket Brigade has switched gears and now uses that independent spirit and infrastructure to monitor the oil disaster's effects on the local eco-system and residents. As BP holds the reigns to most of the official data and cleanup efforts, many have expressed a sense of frustration at both the company's lack of direction and its unwillingness to share information, such as exactly how much oil is spewing from its pipeline.

To counter this, the Bucket Brigade is working on a crisis map documenting various aspects of the disaster's effects on the local people, with everything from oil sightings to fishermen out of work being reported by the local people and posted on an interactive map on the internet. You can even send a text message to post on the map. The information is so current that even the government has begun to use it to keep abreast of new developments.

We walked out of their office with a new sense of purpose: tomorrow, we're headed to Venice to document what's going on, specifically trying to talk to the out of work fishermen to show the human side of all that's going on down here.

--John