By Jayne Johnson
The PIE Center hit the halfway mark of the five-year, $6.5 million Healthy Gulf, Healthy Communities project that addresses concerns in Gulf communities following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
To mark the occasion, UF researchers welcomed the community partners to Gainesville to share research findings and to identify goals for the remaining two years of the grant.
The research focuses on the resiliency of communities, families and individuals, as well as the safety of the seafood harvested in areas impacted by the oil spill. The PIE Center forms the Community Outreach and Dissemination Core to communicate findings and help communities gain resources and increase resiliency.
“The benefit we get out of this is that by bringing people together, we can begin to affect change at our local levels,” said Joe Taylor, executive director of Franklin’s Promise Coalition, a non-profit organization that works collaboratively to help Franklin County residents financially and emotionally.
Glenn Morris, director of UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute and principal investigator on the grant, thanked the community
partners for sharing their concerns and opinions.
“There are some really good ideas here,” Morris said. “The key is going to be how we implement them. We’ve got two years left at this point, so this discussion provides us a guidebook of where we’re going to go without working with you. The reason this works is because of you.”
Community resilience
Bryan Mayer, associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, leads the research team examining the vulnerability and resiliency of areas affected by the oil spill.
“We’re really interested in what are the characteristics of the community that make it capable of adapting and responding to disasters,” Mayer said.
Researchers compared wealth, poverty, age, ethnicity, employment and social connections in three counties in Florida and Alabama.
In Florida, Franklin County showed high levels of social vulnerability and low levels of resiliency, Mayer said, while Santa Rosa shows low vulnerability and a high level of community resilience.
Despite oil hitting the shores in Baldwin County, Alabama, the area has recovered much quicker with growths in the tourism
and seafood industry. Franklin County, however, faces a collapsed oyster population and flat tourism rates.
An isolationist culture and divided working and business class has hampered Franklin County’s recovery, according to Mayer.
“Recovering and adapting after disasters requires social connections,” he said. “Close ties and bonds provide emotional support but have the possibility of limiting long-term recovery. When it comes to being more prepared for disasters in the future, it’s more about those broader connections that provide the ability to mobilize resources and get them to people who need it most.”
Individual Resilience
University of Maryland Associate Professor Lynn Grattan studied resilience and mental health among individuals and families in the affected areas. Grattan found anger dropped from 2010 and 2012 but rose last year, likely in relation to support programs ending and BP announced it would fight claims.
Grattan found high levels of depression and anxiety among Gulf residents, with anxiety being the most predominant. Residents’ loss of income had a stronger association with mental health than whether the individuals were directly impacted by the oil spill.
“There are all kinds of brochures and information about how to prepare for hurricanes, but I’m wondering if we should spend more time with individuals and communities to prepare them a little better for the stresses they’ll be facing in regard to mental health,” Grattan said.
Seafood Safety
UF’s Andy Kane, associate professor and director of the Aquatic Pathobiology Laboratory, collected about 1,000 samples of shrimp, oyster, crab and fish in late 2011 to test for oil or spill-related contaminants.
“In the samples we’ve tested, we can’t find anything in them,” he said. “There were 4.9 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf, and I don’t see any oil in the seafood. Where did it go?”
After the spill, many blamed BP for ruining the Gulf’s bountiful seafood industry. But Kane said his concern is focused only on the public health risk and not accountability.
“BP isn’t my concern. My concern is there’s a public health risk from the oil spill-related contaminants,” Kane said. “ That accountability linkage isn’t really part of the science I’m working on.”
