PERDIDO BAY, FL-AL STATE LINE (July 14-15, 2010)
WMR has discovered that BP is discriminating against hiring local Gulf residents, including those with scientific and engineering degrees, in favor of out-of-state contractors and illegal aliens to assist in environmental clean up resulting from the firm's devastating Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Texas buses
ferrying illegal BP workers from west Mobile to Alabama and Florida
beaches.
Every morning in Tillmans Corner, a crossroads in west Mobile, Alabama, workers gather outside a vacant strip mall store to board buses that take them to the beaches for clrean up work for BP.
However, these are not local workers who have been hired by the British oil giant but illegal aliens hired from Mexico, through Texas, and Jamaica.
A close look at the buses that ferry the clean up crews to the beaches reveal that they belong to Turnaround Transportation, Inc. of Wichita Falls, Texas.
The firm's website, which is under construction, reveals the company provides "transportation specialists for the refining, construction and petrochemical industries," and adds its buses are state inspected and fully registered with the State of Texas for use on all roadways."
Local residents report the workers are being put up in motels along Interstate 10 in west Mobile and that few speak any English. There are also reports that some of the workers have committed rapes and muggings in the area.
WMR spoke to one unemployed chemical and environmental engineer laid off from the paper industry who signed up to take BP's wildlife clean up course only to find out that she would not be hired to help clean oil off of water fowl.
The water fowl clean up in Alabama has taken on the air of a covert intelligence operation, with details being hidden by BP and the Coast Guard.
However, the reason for the secrecy, according to one local source, is that the marine bird population has been decimated by the oil disaster and the Coast Guard and BP do not want bird census data revealed in order to protect the firm from major legal damages.
Secrecy also extends to the number of dead sea mammals. WMR witnessed two night flying helicopters, search lights trained on waters along the Florida-Alabama coast, to spot dead dolphins, manatees, and whales.
Clean-up personnel, under the cover of darkness, covertly dispose of the carcasses without the attention of the media.
Marine biologists told WMR that the situation is becoming so desperate for sharks that they are resorting to bumping into the hulls of research vessels in search of food.
Here, on the coastline of the Alabama-Florida state line, this editor has experienced a sore throat, the same symptoms now affecting other residents of the area.
