Wathen honored for his attention to Gulf oil spill, Hurricane Creek

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John Wathen, the Hurricane Creekkeeper from Friends of Hurricane Creek, has received the Wild South’s Roosevelt-Ashe Society Conservation Award for Outstanding Journalist in Conservation.

By Patty Vaughan Special to the Tuscaloosa News

Published: Monday, April 4, 2011 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, April 3, 2011 at 11:13 p.m. 

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John Wathen, the Hurricane Creekkeeper from Friends of Hurricane Creek, has received the Wild South’s Roosevelt-Ashe Society Conservation Award for Outstanding Journalist in Conservation.

Wathen was recognized for his research on last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to a Friends of Hurricane Creek news release.

“It’s given to various volunteers and people who have contributed to the environmental movement through the year,” Wathen said. “I was chosen as a nominee for the media work that I do based around environmental issues here in Tuscaloosa County, but primarily for my work in the Gulf of Mexico last year.”

Wathen cares for the watershed and is the enforcement for polluters at Hurricane Creek. For the Gulf Coast, he works with the Waterkeeper Alliance, an international federation of groups.

“We all have the same premise that these are our waters, and people don’t have a right to deprive us of those clean waters,” Wathen said.

By traveling to the coast off and on for about a year, Wathen was able to take photos and video of the oil spill and post all of it on his blog, BP Slick.

“I got an award for journalism and for just telling the story of people who are in pretty dire straits down there on the coast,” Wathen said. “It’s their story. It was for my continued writing, photography and videography in the Gulf. That blog site, BP Slick, is a chronological record of everything I did in the Gulf of Mexico from the day I got there.”

Nelson Brooke, the Black Warrior Riverkeeper, nominated Wathen for his work at Hurricane Creek, but also his work in the Gulf.

“John is an amazing advocate and activist,” Brooke said. “(He) has done an incredible job in the past number of years giving up his personal time to get out and document major, national, environmental catastrophes and put the word out there in the form of blogs, photos and videos so that the masses can see what’s going on out there from the ground and from the air. He’s giving a viewpoint that’s just not being given by the general media.”

Wathen said his group, SouthWings,  was flying over the Gulf in airplanes and bringing back pictures and video that were refuting what the U.S. Coast Guard was reporting at the time.

OIL in the Chandeleur Barrier Islands By JLW

“(Commandant Adm.) Thad Allen said one day that there was ‘Potential oiling at the Mississippi River.’ We photographed massive oil slicks covering the islands out there, and the Mississippi River was literally weeping oil out of it,” Wathen said. “The next day, Thad Allen upgraded his statement to say that the situation was far more grave than he had been told the day before.”

Laurie Johns, president of the board of Friends of Hurricane Creek, said the organization hires him to specifically keep the creek clean.

“He does a great job of evidence gathering and documenting the violations that he finds,” Johns said. “While this award came to their attention primarily for his work he did in the Gulf, John is working as hard as he possible can to get the word out that actually everything is not OK down there.”

Wathen said his blog site has more than 2 million followers.

“I’m not trying to take an extreme amount of credit for just being a storyteller, but if there hadn’t been storytellers like myself and others down there, you would have never heard the truth about what really happened in the Gulf of Mexico and it’s still happening today,” Wathen said. “Our waters are not safe, and our seafood is not safe.”

Wathen said he has photographed shrimp boats hauling shrimp from oil-stained water.

Shrimp boat pulls nets through fresh oil By JLW

“Our people are eating this stuff, because the government says it’s safe, and we’re looking at oil all over the fishing grounds,” he said.

Wathen said anyone willing to just take a camera, a cell phone video or a recording device can tell a story of what’s happening in their area and people will listen. 

“You don’t have to be a credentialed journalist or a newspaper reporter to be able to tell a story,” Wathen said. “Everybody has that capability, and with today’s technology, it’s really amazing that more people don’t do it. Anybody can do it, and everybody should be doing it.”