The oil washed ashore every day, globs of tarlike ooze blighting sugar-white sand beaches. Rodney Boblitt’s job was to report it.
A special agent for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, he was assigned to patrol 14 miles of Panhandle beaches on an all-terrain vehicle, alerting cleanup crews to new slicks from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.
His 16-hour shifts started at dawn. The air felt greasy; the ATV splashed up oil, he said, soaking his clothes, gun belt, hat, and boots.
“The smells were horrendous,” he recalled. “Like the ocean mixed with chemicals.”
About 4 million barrels of crude oil seeped into the Gulf of Mexico and 11 people died in the April 2010 disaster, the largest marine oil spill in history. Tens of thousands of workers were hired to clean sludge on beaches, mangroves, and dunes across Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and the Florida Panhandle.
Boblitt said he wasn’t the same when he returned to his regular job after three months in the Panhandle. He struggled to concentrate. Knowledge gleaned from years of service eluded him. Physically demanding work caused him to shake.
Within two years, he said, he’d deteriorated so much he no longer trusted himself to handle airboats, personal watercraft and his firearm safely.
He took early retirement. He was 43.
M …