Page 13 - Shell Fish News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> reporter: all the way down. i'm going to grab a towel here. this is rubbing up against the side of the boat. there it is. that's what's in the water, sticking to the side of the boat right there. if this is doing this to the boat, what is it going to do to anything that lives in the water? >> hard on the fish and shell fish. >> reporter: the oil seems to go on forever. over here, as far as the eye can see, there's a red line of that oil going right across the gulf of mexico. it is endless. as bad as it looked, it was about to get worse. this was something we didn't expect to see. this is a ...

Of dispersed oil that settled on the bottom. the big thing is, who's going to want to eat that? how are they going to sell their catch? >> seems like -- just driving down here, coming down route 23 and seeing the industry and seeing the businesses and seeing the -- you know, what's painted on people's trucks in terms of where they work, it sort of feels like the oil industry giveth and the oil industry taketh away. i mean, obviously it's the spine of the economy here, it's the fishing and oil industry. even literally, the oil rigs providing a habitat for the fish that you catch as a charter bo...

Long-term impact on this region. >> is there a telltale sign -- when you're trying to assess things like this, is there a telltale sign you look for in terms of the impact to the impact? >> on saturday we flew over the area. the water is not healthy. you can see there's not a shine the way it normally would have. the scale of this thing is so large. it's hard to describe. that oil sitting on the oil is mixing in the water column, will be taken up by the fish, the shell fish. oysters, for example, take up oil 1,000 times of what's in the water column. so if there's one part per million in the w...

And we're hoping to protect all we can. the shore birds that we're assigned to protect. >> we're talking about this time of year where there's a lot of nesting going on, hatching of eggs, et cetera and while these booms might help, where things aren't as transient, such as oysters and shell fish, when you talk about migratory birds, isle it's really difficult to contain them, sit not? >> it is, as a matter of fact the first bird that we have received is a northern ganette and that comes up from newfoundland, and it uses here during these months and then heads up to summer in new foundland, so ...

Weekend from the commencement at the university of michigan to tomorrow he's planning to visit the gulf coast to see for himself bha's happening as 5,000 barrels of oil a day seep into the gulf. b.p. who owns the well says it plans to add large amounts of chemical dispersants, those are supposed to latch on to the oil and allow it to disperse. a lot of people are worried about what will happen to the fragile ecosystem. we're already seeing birds and marine life coated with oil. the louisiana coast alone is expected to be hit first and possibly the hardest. 40% of the coastal wet lands in the c...