NSBE - Winter 2010/2011 - 50

BlAcks, EnginEErs And thE BP Oil sPill

An endangered Kemp’s Ridley turtle swims out from under an oil pattie as rescue workers attempt to capture the oiled animal for rehabilitation on June 14, 2010.
Carolyn Cole/LA Times

By wiley a. Hall 3rd
and Hispanics — are the invisible victims of the spill. “When a tragedy like this happens, people living outside the area, like me, get the work. But the people who live there don’t. They always get hit hardest.” “Remember, we’re talking about the Deep South, and we’re not that far from segregation and sharecropping,” Bingham continues. “A lot of the people down there are very much involved in subsistence fishing or have hourly jobs in the energy industry. They’re the people who can least afford to lose their work.” The American Association of Blacks in Energy, based in Washington, D.C., is working on a position paper on the impact of the oil spill on people of color. The association’s executive director, Frank Stewart, notes two seemingly contradictory facts: blacks along the Gulf Coast in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas have some of the lowest per capita incomes in the country. Yet the employment in energy-related jobs is heavy there, albeit at the service sector level. This means decision-makers who care about such issues will have to engage in a delicate balancing act, weighing the need for reform against the need for jobs, knowing all the while that anything they decide may have a disproportionately harmful impact on blacks. “Nothing is ever one-sided, and everything is complicated,” Stewart says. “I would hope the federal government and others will take time to think through the consequences of their actions very carefully.”
www.nsbe.org

n the end, the death of BP’s runaway gushing oil well seemed anticlimactic, as though the public had grown too exhausted by the months-long struggle to kill the beast to feel much triumph over its final demise. Or maybe people sensed that although the beast was dead, the fight had only begun. Indeed, months have passed. Scientists and government review boards are probing the ecological and financial effects of the disaster. Politicians are grandstanding. The companies involved are pointing fingers. The people who made their living on the now-tainted waters are growing increasingly concerned that their needs are getting short shrift. The only thing anyone seems to know for certain is that there remains a price to be paid for the series of mistakes and mishaps that produced one of the largest and costliest environmental disasters in U.S. history. Oh, and one more thing: whatever the final reckoning, the lion’s share of the tab will likely be borne by people of color.

INvISIBLE vICTIMS
NSBE member Pamela Bingham, principal of Bingham Consulting Services, is an environmental engineer and a native of Mississippi. Since 2006, she has been working on proposals to retrain people affected by Hurricane Katrina in jobs related to coastal restoration and environmental protection. She says members of minority groups — particularly African Americans
50 • CAREER ENGINEER • winter 2010/11 •

NSBE - Winter 2010/2011

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