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dean and ask him to match what we could come up with. This would put us in the $8,000 dollar range – hardly the numbers of ‘big science’, but enough to get us roughly 1,000 short telephone interviews with targeted coastal community residents to gauge their mental and physical reactions to the spill. When we approached the dean of our college, he appreciated our willingness to invest our own funds and offered to cover the whole cost of the survey. With incredible cooperation from the PPRL, we were able to begin fielding surveys almost immediately, and between June 17 and July 1, 2010 we were able to collect nearly 1,000 completed surveys. Our report was issued by mid-July. It was the first empirical assessment of the mental health toll the spill was taking on coastal populations, and received far reaching nationwide press coverage, including a piece on the CNN.com health blog by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Since then, that report has been circulated among hundreds, and probably thousands, of scholars, journalists and laypersons, and we continue to get frequent inquiries from all over the place based on that report.
N Nan Walker D Director of the Earth Scan Laboratory, School of the C Coast & Environment Th The disaster offshore showed up as a large smoke p plume in the LSU Earth Scan Lab’s April 21 morniing MODIS satellite image. We “saw” the oil spill for tthe first time on April 25, when it was relatively small, about the size of the Mississippi “birdfoot” delta. We had some experience tracking oil spills along the Louisiana coast since there were at least 300 after Hurricane Katrina. However, this one was different. This one was easier to track, it grew too big too fast, and it seemed to last a lifetime. The lab, tucked away on the fourth floor of the “Old” Geology Building, bustled with film crews from WAFB local news, CBS national news, Nova in the Netherlands, and National Geographic, to name a few. The staff and students looked at image after image