On April 24, 2010, oil from a rupture of the Deepwater Horizon offshore well started to leak in the Gulf of Mexico. It continued unabated for three months.
Cleanup continues, said Chris Phelan, assistant Allen County attorney, who recently completed a 54-day deployment as a Coast Guard reservist in New Orleans.
“Great progress has been made, but there’s still much to do,” said Phelan, 38, an attorney whose specialty is environmental concerns.
“It’s a complicated process,” he said, made so by weather conditions and concerns for endangered species of wildlife that inhabit the gulf coast — nesting and raising of young have to be taken into consideration.
Phelan noted that cleanup of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, much smaller that the 5 million barrels of crude that streamed from British Petroleum’s off-shore well, took three years to complete. The 1989 spill was less than a million barrels.
Phelan’s role in the cleanup wasn’t hands-on, rather in coordination with state and local governments and Native American tribes that have propriety rights with some land affected, as well as British Petroleum.
“I gave input (on legal issues) and investigated adverse effects,” Phelan said.
With his office was in New Orleans, Phelan experienced a hurricane firsthand, when Isaac came ashore in late August.
“We shut everything down and didn’t work for several days,” he said.
The Coast Guard, well-versed in dealing with ocean-born storms, gave Phelan and others in his detachment “a laundry list of things we needed to do. We filled our bathtubs with water (for drinking and sanitary needs) and were told to stay inside. The day before the storm hit, New Orleans was like a ghost town. The streets were empty.”
When the storm arrived, curiosity got the better of Phelan. He couldn’t resist going outdoors, “to see what it was like. It was hard to keep your balance. It was like a long-lasting bad storm (in Kansas). Trees were blown over and it rained hard for several days.”
The storm stirred intrigue more than fear, Phelan said, with it being a category 1, the least severe on the scale used to describe hurricanes.
“It was an opportunity for me to see a hurricane with no adverse effects,” Phelan said.
PHELAN joined the Coast Guard in 1996, with duty including time in South America working with drug interdiction teams.
He remained in the reserves after his discharge and graduated from the University of Kansas Law School in 2004. The reserve role included 14 months of port assessment duty, to determine security risks of incoming vessels, before he became County Attorney Wade Bowie’s assistant in June 2011.
He spends one weekend a month with his reserve unit in Louisville and is obligated to two weeks of summer training, as well as special calls to duty such as that in New Orleans.
