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Jazmen and Kyle's Full Interview

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Jazmen Gisclair & Kyle Williams

February 17, 2012

South Lafourche High School

*Interview questions, video, and audio done by South Lafourche High School students*

What’s your name?

JG: Jazmen. 

KW: Kyle Williams.

How old were you at the time of the oil spill?

JG: I was ten.

KW: I was twelve.

How did the oil spill affect your family?

JG:  It affected my family because my dad had a dramatic pay cut, like he was making $10,000 because he was like a boat captain for fifteen years and now he’s making $5,000 instead and it just put a big pressure on my family because we can’t pay as much bills as we used and have money for extra stuff. 

KW: It affected my family because my granddad has a camp in Grand Isle and about a couple months after the spill his camp was heavily oiled and there are still traces of oil in the rocks around his camp today.  Also when we were at camp, we couldn’t fish or anything, or hardly to go trawling because, because everything in that area was closed.

How was it living through the spill?

JG:  It wasn’t really bad for my family.  I mean, my dad was the one who would bring all the equipment to the rigs, especially the one that blew up, but it really didn’t affect it because all they had to do was change the route of my dad’s boats and it really didn’t affect my family that much.

KW: I was really, after the spill I was pretty much a nervous wreck after that because my way of life is pretty much all on the water.  And after that, if something happened that I can’t go back to that, I don’t know what I would do.

How did you react when you heard the news?

JG: I was in a scared state because my dad was like two days from getting off the boat and he was, like I said, the main provider of that BP oil rig that blew up, and I was just scared that he was by it and that it might have like caught his boat on fire or that he was actually on the rig when it happened.  I was just scared.

KW: Like I said earlier, I was scared for my way of life.  I didn’t know if would be able to go back to what I was doing before. 

Where were you?

JG: I was at school, in class.  I got a text message from my mom saying that a rig blew up.

KW:  I was at my house, in my room watching TV and my mom called me into the living room and we literally spent hours sitting there, watching CNN.

How did it affect your community?

JG: Like, it affected the shrimping and crab and oyster industries dramatically.  And I think for that whole, like two years, I think trawling was shut down, or something like that, or there was like restrictions on where you can go.  Instead of, it used to be you could go pretty much anywhere if you had land and there was like shrimp or anything there. A lot of people couldn’t fish anymore and it affected our community big because we rely on the water.

KW: It threatened a lot of people’s livelihoods because literally about half, literally almost everybody in some way makes their living from trawling, crabbing, or producing or harvesting oysters or working the oil field, which was also shut down for a long time after the spill, so that was pretty bad for our community.

JG: It also affected our gas prices because they went up dramatically after it, and our beaches was all full of oil.  It was amazing that nobody actually went to go clean it up just before it got to the beaches because it just took so long to clean it up and they’re still in the process of cleaning it up. 

KW: Yeah.  If you go to the beaches still today, if you dig just a couple of feet down underneath the sand you’ll still find oil.

JG: And there’s big old clumps of oil.  Like, if you like put enough pressure on it, it will just, like, kind of explode and it was just look poof.

KW: And then this summer we went to the beach and we would still find little shells full of oil and all, still.

JG: So we’re still recovering from that.  I don’t think that we would ever be quite recovered from it for a while. 

KW: It will take, it will take centuries for it to get about how it was before.

JG: I don’t think centuries, I think it will take probably decades, not centuries.  Like it will probably over with by the time we’re either like 40 or 50 or 60 years old.  Maybe.

KW: No, it’s still going to, like, our great, great, great grandchildren will still be probably dealing with the effects of the oil spill when they’re our age.  

JG: Yeah.  Probably.

Uh, did you talk about it?

JG: Yes.  I talked about it a lot at school.  But at school all we talked about was the negative that came out of it.  And really there was no positives, but they just kept making us say, this is a bad thing, it’s, everything, like, it’s their fault.  And it was, like I said, there was no really good things about it at all, but school did not help it because all the teachers would be negative about it and make you be more scared and more worried than what we should have been.

When I talked about it with my family, which was a lot, it was the main topic at the dinner table.  My dad would just say, “It was just bound to happen because of the rigs.” People really don’t pay attention to the hydraulics and everything, they would check it maybe once a week and if there was something wrong they would fix it to where it would keep going for another week and just keeping fixing it that little bit. 

KW: There was really a lot of negative comments made around, both in school and in my family.  Because, honestly, we didn’t know a lot about it.  We just knew that it was BP, at that moment in time we hated BP.

JG: I think everyone hated BP down here.

Um, did you have any lifestyle changes?

JG: Um, not really.  My dad still had his “sea legs” as he would like to say.  And my brother, his opinions on the boats didn’t change, he’s still working on the boats this summer and ________ works with the rigs and it really didn’t affect how they thought about their jobs at all and it really didn’t affect our lifestyle at all.

KW: Well, it affected me at first because, like I said earlier, we couldn’t do anything, like everything was closed around here.  Now that everything’s at least back to normal, around here at least to where you can fish in-shore and trawl, it didn’t really change that much.

JG: Yeah, it really didn’t change like our lifestyles, but all of the trawlers and that was there, like Poppy’s in Golden Meadow, like their shrimp shack was closed down. I think it just opened this summer, recently, for like the last two weeks of it.  I went and go talk to them because they’re my family’s friends and everything and they said they couldn’t because every shrimp they caught would either be full of oil or too small to catch and they had to throw it back.  But, it didn’t really affect us in maybe a major way, but all of the other trawling and fishery and boat, people that worked on the boats, it affected them in either a major way or just a little way.

KW: And also, the oyster industry, there were a lot of places that the oysters just got covered with oil. 

JG: Yeah, everybody was afraid to eat seafood. Like, they would open an oyster and everybody was like “Don’t eat it.  It’s probably full of oil.” The seafood, like crawfish, I used to eat crawfish almost every day in the winter and now I haven’t eaten it in two years.  I miss it a lot. 

KW:  It’s not the crawfish that are affected by it because, a lot of people think that, but they’re the freshwater animals, they wouldn’t be affected by the oil.

JG: Yeah, they found, they had porpoises washing up on the beaches and when they told me that, when my dad told me that, I was like extremely terrified because if these animals can’t live through the oil spill, then how can we?

KW: Yeah.

JG: That was a scary thing.  My dad told me the first porpoise washed up on the beach and I was like, “Oh my God, no.”  And then I actually really did say that, “How can we live if these animals can’t live in these conditions?”

KW: Yeah, because if the porpoises were dying a lot of --

JG: Then the little nurse sharks we got in here and all the fish and everything would die and it was just, like, how is this fishing industry still going to become in about 20 or 40 years from now?

KW: And also, the population of smaller fish are usually eaten by the porpoises, so they would just grow out of proportion.

JG: Yeah, it would be like overpopulated. 

Is there anything else you guys would like to add?

JG: Not really.  I think we covered everything.

KW: I’m pretty sure.

Thank you to Jazmen, Kyle and all the South Lafourche High School students that created this video with their awesome questions, videography, photography, and other assistance.