When I put out our call to ask for help funding the Expedition, I promised full and complete disclosure of what our expenses were and how we were putting your money to work. Not only did I figure this was the fair thing to do, but I also wanted to put a little transparency into what it takes to undertake an operation like this for educational purposes in case others want to try to do something like it in the future. Here’s the data:

Our recorded expenses in the Gulf of Mexico for the Expedition and to Washington DC to present our images and stories add up to $13,816.08. That doesn’t include the odd $1.00 toll or pack of M&Ms or beef jerky or batch of Cherry Limeades (yay, Sonic!) that didn’t make it into the accounting. It also doesn’t include a few expenses that I’ve not heard about from the other team members. But, it does include airplanes, cars, boats, meals, and lodging. In short, it’s almost the full accounting.

Here’s how it breaks out:

Airfare: $6,135.78. This is for flying five people to both New Orleans and Washington DC on short notice from various parts of the country. There’s no good way to take advantage of cheap fares when you’re on a deadline and when there aren’t any fare wars going on. Seaplane: $4275. This was for two flights out to the source with one returning via Barataria Bay and the other via Gulf Shores, Alabama. Hotels: $1732.06. Our most frequented stay was La Quinta. One night was at the Holiday Inn Express. Another was at a non-name place in Grand Isle, an amazingly hard place to find a hotel right now given all the workers staying on the island. The most expensive hotel nights were in Washington DC, of course.

Food: $751.45. This item came in much cheaper than I expected. Possibly because the Washington DC food expenses weren’t centralized. Mostly, we just ate very economically. I think our biggest splurge was a dinner at Chevy’s one night. Car Rental: $418.82 for our black Nissan Xterra. I’m sure the Hertz didn’t appreciate having to clean out the sand from all of our beach excursions. Gas: $168.92. Of course, we always avoided BP gas stations. Taxi: $160 for schelpping people around in Washington DC. Boat: $140. We didn’t spend much on big boats because none were to be found. All we were able to score was a flatboat. Still, we got a great deal on this. Ferry: $34 between Dauphin Island and Alabama.

The expenses tallied, lets look at the income side of the equation:

$6728.98 has been given through 140 donations as of June 30th. The average donation was $48.06. After PayPal fees of $248.44, that gives us $6480.54 to apply to our expenses. I’m currently working through the process of getting money out of PayPal right now, but I expect to have that taken care of soon.

If anybody was worried about funding our vacations after the TEDxOilSpill event, they don’t need to be. You’ll note that the expense balance will be $7335.54 after we get the current donation balance out of PayPal. We’re all still underwater by a good deal on this on out of pocket expenses. But there may be other opportunities to recoup some costs along the way. Furthermore, we knew the risks going in and are quite happy that the donations have covered as much as they have. For that, we thank you. —Duncan

If you’d like to help us out a bit more, please consider donating via PayPal.

The last day of our expedition found us waking up at 5:30AM in a La Quinta in Gulf Shores, Alabama. We had returned for a final few hours on the beaches here after witnessing oil on the beach and water the previous day from the air. We didn’t have long—we had to be back at the airport in New Orleans just after lunch—but we wanted to see what things looked like from the ground.

Oiled Beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama

We arrived right at high tide. That meant that the bulk of the oil on the beach that we saw the day before was covered. The sand all along the water line, however, was oil stained. You could look out to sea and see the sheen of oil. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might mistake it for something else. But we’d seen it from the air and knew what we were looking at. It made us cringe to see tourists walking barefoot along the beach and out in the water. It horrified us when we spotted a family with a few children using nets to fish something out of the water. I couldn’t quite spot what was in their nets, but they took whatever it was with them.

A family uses nets to fish things out of the water.

At one point, we talked with one of the safety officers for the clean up crew. He had served in Iraq and as we talked about his service history, he said that he felt he was doing his country more of a service on the beaches in Alabama than he did oversees. He also said that he had seen the test results of the water and while most of the aromatics has evaporated from the oil by the time it reached the Alabama coast, there’s no way he’d go in the water or walk on the beach without foot protection. But, the local hotels and tourism boards were attempting to encourage a business as usual attitude and at least some people were buying it.

Workers on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama

After spending a few hours scouting the beaches, we drove back to New Orleans and all took our separate flights home. We’ve all got thousands of photographs to sort through, stories to write about, and our own personal emotional states to tend to. This hasn’t been an easy week.

We’re proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish here on the Gulf of Mexico. We’ve seen the surface scope of this disaster and we’re going to bring our first hand account to TEDxOilSpill next Monday. It’s horrifying and terrible—all the more so since we know that we’re only seeing a fraction of the effects of this disaster. Most of the oil still lurks underwater. Most of the wildlife that’s being affected lives under the surface. It’s a sobering thought we continue to come back to.

Speaking for myself (Duncan), I can say that I want to go back to continue working this story. We’ve done an amazing amount of work in a week, but with that experience, I’m sure that we could do even more. As well, the effects of this disaster are not over. This story will be a long one and as the attention on it inevitably wanders elsewhere, it’ll need more coverage. I hope that the team, either together or individually, can return to document more of the effects here.

Photos credit: James Duncan Davidson

Yesterday, we had five people on our team. Today, we’re down to four. Darron had to make it home for the weekend and some much deserved downtime leaving the rest of us one more full day in the Gulf States. We used it to arrange another flight over the Gulf of Mexico with Pinar, Kris, and Duncan.

We debated intensely over our routing. Should we head back out to the source? Should we spend more time over the wetlands of Louisiana? Or, should we follow a tip we’d heard from somebody that had flown over Orange Beach that indicated oil was just offshore? In the end, we decided to fly a triangle route from New Orleans out to the source and then up to Gulf Shores. It was a risk, especially at $570/hour of airtime, but we figured it was a risk worth taking.

With a last check of the weather—which showed storms over the Gulf, but based on the patterns, we figured we could time things to miss them—we set out. As we approached the source, we spotted the fires burning off gas from about 20 miles out and saw oil in the water at about the same distance.

Flying over the source, we saw amazing amounts of heavy oil in the water and spent a few orbits over both the main site as well as a few other boats in the area. The smell of oil and gas over the source is intense. It’s like standing next to a bucket of gasoline sitting next to a leaky propane tank. Flying around it—and knowing that the true source of the oil is a mile underwater—is like flying over the gates of a watery hell.

Flying north from the source to Gulf Shores, we saw oil ranging from sheen to much heavier all the way to the coast and as far as the eye can see in both directions. It’s over a hundred miles from the spill site to the coast of Alabama. There’s no good way to describe how huge an area is impacted.

A ship in the oil. (Photo: Kris Krüg)

When we arrived at Gulf Shores, we saw the oil coming up on the beach. Beaches that had been relatively clean a few days ago, when we were last there, now were stained with oil. Skimmers were operating right off the shore.

Oil in the water and on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama (Photo: Pinar Özger)

Amazingly enough, a few miles down shore where oil wasn’t yet on the beach, but within hundreds of yards, we spotted swimmers in the water. We were flabbergasted. If they could see what we saw, there’d be no way they would be in that water.

Once we returned to New Orleans, we huddled for a bit and decided to return by land to Gulf Shores so that we can document the oil coming on shore from the beachside. That will be tomorrow morning’s task.

When we first conceived of the idea of doing an expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, we knew we had to move fast. So we did. We planned the trip in a week and found ourselves in Louisiana the next. As part of this rapid-fire planning and execution, we set up a PayPal donation link to help fund our expedition. We’ve been humbled by the response and the support has literally been the wind beneath our wings as we flew in a seaplane across the Gulf of Mexico yesterday.

When we announced the PayPal link, we committed to using every scrap of money raise to pay for expenses related to the expedition. We also committed to transparency and reporting what the donations were used for. Here’s a quick update to give you an idea of where we stand.

In the four days since we kicked off the PayPal link, we’ve raised a bit over $5700. In the same period of time, we’ve racked up expenses as a team of $10,010 with probably another $2500 to go, the majority of which will be our second seaplane flight tomorrow.

As you can see, your contributions have helped in a major way, and we’re grateful. They show that the community of people rallying around the TEDxOilSpill event and the general public really care about this news and support our commitment to bring more coverage to this ongoing environmental disaster whose effects will be felt for a very long time to come.

As we work in the Gulf, we’re very aware that we’re working for you and are looking to bring you our view of the situation and to share it with the world. We’ve been posting photos and blog posts as we go. We’ll present even more at TEDxOilSpill. And, everyone on the team is committed to putting out additional work based on the photos and stories captured in the Gulf of Mexico this week.

If you’ve donated, thank you so very much. You rock and we’d love to shake your hand, give you a hug, and otherwise show our appreciation.

If you’d like to help us out with the rest of our expenses, please use the PayPal donation link.

Last, if you are somebody at an organization that would like to respond to the general public’s amazing contribution and match it, please get in touch.

Again, everyone on the team here in the Gulf of Mexico—Duncan, Kris, Pinar, Darron, and Danielle—are humbled by your show of support and we thank you.

Photo credits: Kris Krüg, Pinar Özger, and James Duncan Davidson. Click through any photo see it larger on Flickr.

One of the challenges in flying out to the Deepwater Horizon site is getting clearance to fly into the restricted airspace in the Gulf of Mexico. The temporary flight restriction (TFR) has been used to keep lots of flights out in the past. Luckily, we’re working with an operator that knows how to use their connections to get flights approved into the TFR. Once approved, the flight is issued a “squawk code” that is transmitted by the aircraft to let the people monitoring the restricted area know we are supposed to be there.

Even with all that in place, it sometimes doesn’t mean that everything goes smoothly. As we flew out to the Deepwater site, our pilot Dicky was in constant contact with a Navy P3 Orion—a mini AWACS aircraft—orbiting high above the gulf keeping track of everyone.

When we departed the Deepwater site and Dickie communicated to the Orion (call sign “Omaha 99″) our intent, the controller came back quite quickly saying, “You’ve created a hell of a ruckus with your flight today. We’ve got flights in and out of this airspace and you’ve been interfering with them.” We got chewed out for several minutes straight. The funny thing is that we hadn’t been given any advisories or instructions by the controllers the entire time we were orbiting the site. Furthermore, there were no other flights that came or left the immediate area while we were there. We’d have photographs of them if there were.

Something tells me that we weren’t quite welcome there and our presence was merely tolerated. But we were there in any case and we weren’t there to make friends.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Our four-geek-one-Pennsylvania-Dutch-cobbler Oil Spill Expedition team has really gelled over the past four days. But today we had to split up to cover more ground and air. KK, Pinar and Duncan took to the wing to fly to “the source” and buzz the islands in Barataria Bay to capture what we all need to be seeing more of. I got a sneak peek in the geek truck on the ride back down to Grand Isle and heard the crazy stories, but will leave it to them to tell it firsthand.

Daniel and I headed west on I-10 to Baton Rouge, LA to sit in on an oil spill rally. Here’s my take on that event.

10am

My rental car – a blood red Ford Escape – cost $12.00 for the day.  I didn’t correct their mistake.  We’d have to rush to make the 11.30 kick-off of the “march on the Louisiana Capitol building,” which would start at the old capitol building and end on the steps of the new one.  But actually we had plenty of time because there was a scheduling error and last-minute change of plans which moved the march until Friday but kept the rally for today.  We didn’t quite understand the strategy but wanted to see how it would evolve.

Louisiana State Bird

It’s strange.  If ever there was a time for this country to take to the streets I would think it would be now.  A few did.  But not many.  I’m not a child of the 60s nor have I spent much time pounding the streets and raising hell in the 90s or in this decade, but this didn’t quite meet my expectations.  Part of it I suppose was the late change of plans.  Part of it was the mid-day heat and the mid-day jobs.  And part of it, brought to my attention by my fellow expedition member Kris Krug, is the fact that motivations have changed.

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