That afternoon, the Tillmans visited the Henderson Point staging area. Though it was guarded, what they found shocked them:
"There were probably more boats there than in the entire Pass [Christian] VOO program at the time," reads her entry. "There were only a couple of regular skimmer boats. All appeared to have Louisiana registrations. Almost all of the skiffs had the white tanks on them. A few of the tanks looked like they could have had something in them at one time, but nothing like the oily, sticky mess we had been dealing with. If we got something on our boat, it was almost impossible to get it off. I don't see how they could have gotten it out of the tanks and still looked like they did. Also, there was a Harrison County Sheriffs Department car, right by the boats and some large, plastic, white containers with yellow bases."
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Corner of Canal Road and I-10, in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the Gulfport site used as a BP staging area, August 14, 2010. (Photo: Shirley Tillman)
On August 13, the VOO boat that Shirley and Don were running was deactivated. Still very concerned, the next day they visited the BP staging area in Hancock County.
"They had evacuated this site," she writes. "Same setup though, a guard and a Sheriff's car. We then went to a site in Gulfport. Evidently, this is a main BP storage site. There were all kinds of boats, including the tank skiffs. The Sheriffs Department was there also and so was those large, plastic tanks with the yellow bases."
Other reports, of a very similar nature, have been reported about other BP staging areas along the Gulf of Mexico. The tanks are clearly used to store and transport Corexit dispersant. The Carolina Skiffs are clearly used to spray it atop oil.
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Corner of Canal Road and I-10, in Gulfport, at the Gulfport site used as a BP staging area. (Photo: Shirley Tillman)
Corexit tanks, September 1, 2010. (Photo: Shirley Tillman)
Her August 16 entry details her discovery:
"Over the next few days, I continued to go by the Henderson Point site and the Gulfport site. The Henderson Point site brought back a few boats, but none of the tank skiffs or the large plastic tanks. The Gulfport site stayed the same, full of everything. On August 25, I received an email with a link to an article about dispersants. It had a picture of the tanks that dispersants come in, with the label 'Nalco Corexit EC9005A.' They were 330 gallon, large, plastic, white tanks with a yellow base. These were the same tanks that I had been seeing at the Henderson Point site and the Gulfport site. I was able to get the name of the manufacturer of the tanks, off a picture I took and compared it to the picture in the article. It was the same manufacturer. I researched this company on the internet and found the 330 gal tanks. They are marketed as: 'The only manufacturer in the industry to offer portable tanks certified for hazardous goods transport by the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Transportation.'"
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Dead flounder among fish kill, August 6, 2010. (Photo: Shirley Tillman)
Shirley and Don are, like tens of thousands of other VOO workers and Gulf residents, left with more questions than answers.
"While working on the boats, if you pull boom back onto the boat, you not only had to wear Tyvek suits, protective glasses and gloves, you also had to put tape around the gloves and suit sleeves, as well as around your boots and the suit." Shirley asks, "Why would it be safe for people to get into the same water that all of this hazardous stuff was coming out of?"
For the Coast Guard, she aks:
"How can you not know there are boats in the VOO program if you are in charge of the VOO program? The Coast Guard was supposedly over the VOO program, but they acted like they don't know anything about the Carolina Skiffs. The boats were in either a task force or strike force. Every VOO boat has a flag. We all had transponders. This was VOO and Coast Guard regulations. But these skiffs didn't have flags and we never saw transponders on them, nor did they have Coast Guard with them and supposedly every group had at least one Coast Guard in each group. Sometimes we would have two. But the Skiffs didn't have any."
Local media in Pass Christian and Gulfport, Mississippi, are now reporting that BP hopes to have the VOO program in that area completed by September 19.
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