Forget BP: Town Takes Oil Spill Response Into Its Own Hands

June 8, 2010— -- Jamie Hinton, chief of the volunteer fire department in Magnolia Springs, Ala., has lived near the water all his life. The town he calls home is an idyllic community off of Mobile Bay. It's a sleepy town, with just 1,000 residents, and is very dependent on the water. Their mail is delivered by boats. The waters off their coast are rich in crabs, shrimp and fish.

So when the BP oil spill began in the Gulf of Mexico, Hinton said he and others in Magnolia Springs knew that this spill could threaten their way of life. Their hope was that BP and the U.S. government would step in to protect their town.

When they reached out to emergency management officials, Hinton said, they were shocked by the response.

"The first thing the guy said was, 'People are blowing this thing out of proportion, it's just light crude,'" Hinton said. "I told him I don't care if it's light crude or dark crude or sweet crude, I don't want it in my damn river."

Now, 50 days after the rig explosion that set off the spill, the people of Magnolia Springs say BP and the federal government have been all but absent here.

Workers came in and laid down one line of boom at the mouth of Weeks Bay, the little arm of Mobile Bay fed by both the Magnolia and Fish rivers, but within days the rough currents had shredded that boom, making it useless to protect their coast line, Hinton said.

So instead of waiting on more help from BP, the town banded together and came up with its own plan to keep the oil out of the Weeks Bay.

"We're not engineers or anything else," Hinton said. "We're people who had a vision and come hell or high water we're going to put it to work."