Ten years ago today an oil rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana, killed 11 men, and initiated the largest environmental disaster in US history.

The story I wanted to write today is about “My Last Republican Friend”.

I’ll write you the Twitter version. https://twitter.com/SamLMontano/status/1250209349005344770

I went to college in New Orleans with a conservative beauty queen. We lived down the hall from one another and we were both far from our home states in New England, so we bonded over missing the east coast and maple syrup. At 18, when you’re far from home, sometimes that’s enough

Obama was elected that year and our hall celebrated with shots of whiskey while she genuinely mourned for Sarah Palin.

I thought it was a sign of maturity to be friends with someone whose politics you disagreed with, so I spent two years debating her with facts and pleas for compassion. I thought she could be persuaded by reason.

But then, forty-eight hours before the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, Deepwater Horizon exploded.

A plot line so insidious even Hollywood would not have written it unfolded along the Louisiana coast.

When I look at a calendar now I see that the crisis unfolded slowly but in my memory, it happened fast.

One day the photo of twisting metal blanketed the front page of the Times-Picayune and scientists were chartering boats and CNN was live-streaming the gushing oil.

We were all terrified.

In the window of time between knowing a disaster is inevitable but not yet knowing the extent there’s a particular feeling that I’ve never quite been able to name. It’s a kind of dreadful anticipation.

It’s one I experience often now but the first time it happened was my freshman year when we had to evacuate because Gustav came wandering into the Gulf.

I evacuated with a group of girls, including the conservative beauty queen, I had known for a week.

We wedged ourselves into a hotel room in Opelika & held our breath as the storm rolled towards the city. A 3 year old image of what the city could soon look like ran circles in my mind.

I felt it again during BP but instead of a week, it lasted for months. I felt in between learning the well was leaking and when the well was actually capped. I learned that when that feeling mixes with anger, which it often does, it becomes something new, something unwieldy.

The Picayune’s stories grew more alarming by the day but BP claimed, and media repeated, that there was very little oil washing ashore and that they had not been finding many dead animals along the coast.

This was, of course, a lie (fueled by Corexit).

That anger is unwieldy.

One of my professors put us in the car and drove us down to the coast so we could see for ourselves what was happening.

Our professor talked our way through a checkpoint, something else not mentioned on the news, and we climbed up over a dune and under yellow police tape. On the beach there were people in hazmat suits that matched the ones we wore when we gutted flooded, molded homes in the city.

The hazmat suits walked along the beach and stopped every so often to pick up a dead, oil-soaked animal that was put in a bag and thrown into a truck that followed behind them.

I went home and wrote about what I had seen on a blog I had started at the same time the oil began to flow. I shared it on Facebook so I could give others the same unwieldy anger my professor had given me.

My Last Republican Friend and I were still Facebook friends then.

My story highlighted the injustice of the BP Disaster and pleaded for more help for the people, especially fishermen, who had been affected. She read my story as liberal whining.

(Never mind that it was her hero’s enemy I was criticizing for not doing enough.)

She wrote back that the fishermen should get a roll of paper towels and clean it up themselves.

I was incensed and at the time could think of nothing as callus as suggesting that the people who had done nothing to cause this disaster should be responsible for cleaning it up with paper towels.

Seven years later as the president chucked them at Puerto Ricans, I realized that cleaning up disasters with paper towels is the Republican Party's disaster recovery policy.

I told you, plotline so insidious even Hollywood would not write it.

Disaster survivors– often black & brown people & often poor people, who are told to clean up the mess.

The Republican Party gives them a roll of paper towels to clean up the consequences of century-long inequalities, superficial emergency management policies, & capitalism.

New York should be grateful they at least get Mops & Buckets.

I saw in her paper towel comment a profound irrationality and an absence of empathy.

My unwieldy anger at injustice was met with her cruel indifference.

And so, she became My Last Republican Friend.

I did not know then, nor do I now, how to reason with someone who does not see the humanity of others.

I know that will make some of you mad. I don't like the place where it leaves us either.

It’s been nearly a decade since I talked to her but in recent years, especially, I see her often.

She has grown up to become the white women on Fox News. She is indistinguishable from Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks. I recognize her in all the women who have held up this administration and the people who support them.

I saw her beliefs manifest in the President of the United States during Hurricane Maria.

I see her now, every day when the President lies from the podium about the pandemic.

In both emergency management and in science we are told not to get political.

Of course, both disasters and science are political, and in ignoring that fact we do harm.

Silence gets people killed.
Silence means Bounty is the sponsor of our national disaster policy.

There are a million stories to tell about BP -- the failures in planning, Walruses, James Cameron, bribing MMS officials with private jets, an industry that ignores warnings and has never followed safety regulations, a government that does not hold industry to account, & Corexit.

There is the story about the use and abuse of the Louisiana coast and the people who live there. It is a story about both the causes and consequences of climate change.

Last summer I swam at the same beach where I had seen the hazmat suits pick up the dead animals. A lot has changed but we still don’t even know the full extent of the damage. So much was hidden and so much has happened since that has drawn attention away.

BP stands out to me bc I was there & I saw it & it made me understand a lot of things that I hadn’t yet understood about life, disasters, & politics.

It should have and could have been a turning point for how we plan, how we old industry accountable, how we respond to people in crisis.

It didn’t do any of that though, which is yet another lesson we should learn. Especially now in the face of a pandemic and the climate crisis.

If we don't make changes now there will be more and more ten year anniversaries that will be largely ignored.