Fire Chief

I’m a water person and have been lucky enough to spend most of my life with Lake Michigan as a playground. I sail Hobie Cats. I surf. I kayak. I swim laps between buoys. I fish for walleye with friends. It’s a culture and a way of life, something I tried to explain to my landlocked visitors over the holiday weekend who were concerned about a young local girl — about 4 years old — who swam in the lake without fear.

“That was me,” I told them about the girl. “We learned the water temp, the currents, the rip tide, everything from an early age. No one knows the water like we do.”

When I heard about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Gulf Coast, I thought about how devastated I would be — as would the local tourism-based economy — if a similar incident happened on the lakeshore. With that in mind, I truly empathize with the struggle faced by those along the Gulf. They are water people like me, said Jamie Hinton, chief of the Magnolia Spring (Ala.) Volunteer Fire Department. Hinton recently was made famous by a New York Times profile about his fight with BP and its disregard for unified command. He wanted the company to use local resources — and the knowledge of first responders who grew up in the area — to protect an estuary from toxic oil.

“The estuary is a habitat where the smaller fish, like shrimp, grow before they head out into the Gulf of Mexico and land on America’s table,” Hinton said.

You see, Hinton is a local. He’s spent his entire life in the area. He knew tapping into the local knowledge was the best way to protect the estuary and the Gulf shores from the toxic oil. Yet from the onset of the incident, he followed protocol and tried to communicate with unified command based on NIMS as well as with BP officials. But no one returned his call.

“It seems like they don’t even care about what’s going on at the local level,” he said.

So Hinton did the next best thing. He held a town meeting at the firehouse with local residents and bounced around ideas. The group discussed the currents, tides and typical 3-foot wave action that would carry the oil slicks over the 8-inch booms. They then looked at already-existing resources they could use.

The group came up with a simple solution: Use barges as a seawall to block the wave action in front of the estuary and place the 8-inch booms behind it in calm seas so they were able to soak up the oil. The barges also may be used to block the underwater plume, Hinton said. By sinking it up to four feet, theoretically the plume would be forced to the surface to where it then would be managed.

Hinton wanted to put the plan into action, but was told that no action would be taken without the strict permission of unified command. He didn’t care. He moved forward with the plan, even though he feared jail time.

“I felt as if I had violated a federal order by going ahead with our plan as we were,” he said.

Hinton took the ideas of individuals who knew the area — not D.C. officials or a CEO from another country — and now the barge idea has caught on and more areas along the coasts are deploying them. But his story left me with some concern. In my opinion, if leadership isn’t tapping into local knowledge, instead dependent on their perceived ideas of an area or just plain ignorance, there will never be a solution to events like 9/11, Katrina and now the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It makes me wonder what the heck they have been doing besides spending billions of dollars on theories. What happen in Magnolia Springs shows that it doesn’t take money and power to solve these issues. It takes a local, unpaid, volunteer department and concerned citizens to solve the problem.

It makes me thankful for my area’s volunteer department, staffed by people I know, water people like me. After speaking to Hinton and hearing his story, I have more faith in their loyalty to our area than an unattached federal staffer or politician holed up in D.C.

Related links:

• Lack of Unified Command Hurt Efforts to Clean Up BP Oil Spill, Gulf Coast Chiefs Say
  
• Podcast:
  
  Alabama Chiefs Face Off With BP Over Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill