To jittery Ala. fishermen looking for answers, feds say: We don't know.

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 3, 2010; 8:38 AM

MOBILE, ALA. -- The crowd was several hundred jittery Alabamians, many with the deep tans that marked them as commercial shrimpers or oystermen. They had come to a community meeting that promised to "help provide answers" about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Then a federal official stood up, and set expectations almost as low as BP's leaking deep-water well.

"Please respect our experts," said moderator Ann Weaver, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "when they tell you they don't know the answers to your questions."

Don't be mad when we can't help you.

As it turned out, it was the right advice for the event.

Wednesday night's meeting in the Mobile Civic Center had the trappings of a smooth-functioning government event: There were official "facilitators" with microphones, and sympathetic bureaucrats from a number of agencies.

But it didn't have the substance: In most cases, those bureaucrats couldn't answer the questions people had come to ask. The meeting became a sobering -- and, for some, infuriating -- demonstration of the government's inability to get its arms around the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

"People are not looking for I-don't-knows," said Alex Jones, 25, a Mobile area resident, later, after he had walked out. "They're looking for answers, because they need money."

The meeting, organized by an educational group called the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, was held a day after fat "tar patties" began washing up on nearby Dauphin Island, Ala. The oil spill that has been fouling coastal Louisiana for two weeks seemed to have finally arrived here.

In Mobile on Wednesday, many of the fishermen in the audience had come to talk to BP. Since fishing had been stopped because of fears of contamination, they wanted to be paid to help clean up the spill.

But BP didn't send anyone to the meeting.

"Why, did they say?" a woman in the audience yelled.

"They said they were over-extended," said LaDon Swann, the "sea grant" group's director, who was acting as master of ceremonies.

"So are we!" another woman yelled back.

After brief introductory remarks, the crowd at the meeting broke up into smaller question-and-answer sessions on legal issues, mental-health problems stemming from the spill and environmental monitoring. One of the best-attended breakout sessions was the one on "fisheries and wildlife."

There, commercial shrimper Misty Bosarge of Grand Bay, Ala., walked to the microphone and asked the question on everybody's mind. When will officials reopen the fishing areas that are now closed because of the threat of oil?

At the front of the room, an official from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave a lengthy answer, which touched on the process of certifying seafood as clean (in an early step, questionable seafood is simply sniffed by well-trained experts). He talked about collaboration between agencies, and about protecting the food supply.

In other words, he had no idea.

A few minutes later, Bosarge asked her question again: When will the fishing grounds reopen?

The FDA official, Robert Dickey, was more blunt this time.

"It's still spilling," he said. Meaning: Who can predict anything, when the oil hasn't even been shut off yet?

Later, somebody else asked the panel of federal experts: What about these "plumes" of dissolved oil that other scientists are reporting under the gulf surface?

An official from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Buck Sutter, gave his own lengthy answer. He talked about how oil could be in the water, but in such fine droplets that the water could still look clear. He talked about how what looks like oil, in underwater sonar scans, could actually be natural collections of plankton.

In other words, he didn't know.

"It's not that [the oil] is not there" underwater, Sutter said. "It's just that it's really hard to detect."

Another question from the audience: Why is BP hiring outsiders instead of local fishermen to do cleanup work in Alabama? The officials on the panel didn't know: That was a question for BP. They asked people to write down questions on cards, and promised to deliver them to the oil company.

Before it was over, Bosarge -- who'd asked the question about reopening the fishing grounds -- got up and left.

"There's no direct answers in there," she said, indicating the room where the federal officials were still talking. "You're getting all around the bases, but you're never getting home."

One thing Bosarge knows: The oil is out there, in the waters where she searches for shrimp.

She said that, on one recent trip, her crew thought they hadn't seen any sign of oil in the gulf. Then they got to the dock, and saw it: a ring around the boat, a few inches below the waterline.

"It was about yea deep around the side," she said, holding her fingers about five inches apart. It was a shock: the oil must've been hidden underwater.

"It was devastating," she said, to discover that. "What is it doing?"