8/5/10; Simon Mann
New Orleans is the big uneasy, waiting anxiously as the massive uncontrolled oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico creeps ever closer to shore and towards likely environmental and economic calamity. Amid the rallying this week of a community whose memory is seared by images of Hurricane Katrina, of death, despair and national neglect, uncertainty was the common denominator: for its fishing enterprise, for business and industry, for tourism, for the oil industry itself, for Louisiana’s very ”way of life”, according to its Governor, Bobby Jindal. As weather patterns taunted coastal townships as far afield as Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, keeping the slick at bay longer than anticipated, people rounded on Big Oil suspecting that its hunt for easy profits had compromised safety on the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig that caught fire after an explosion two weeks ago and sank 80 kilometres offshore.
