St. Mary's Point, Plaquemines Parish-- In Barataria Bay, necessity has inspired a little ingenuity.
Where there had been no tool for this dirty job, workers use a modified wet vac to suck oil from the marsh.
"I know what it's like to be here on a good day," said Plaquemines Parish Strike Force member Frank Watson, an avid duck hunter. "To see this, it's devastating."
In the last couple of weeks, Watson's crew of 3 men has removed over 100 barrels of oil.
"We can't predict when the oils shows up," said Todd Eppley, who coordinates boats working the spill.
"Sometimes it pops up, sometimes it doesn't."
Large stretches of thick oil seen outside the boom weeks ago have mostly been captured.
"All that has been picked up, and we've just got grass left that's dead," Eppley said.
However, in the inlets, the nooks and crannies of the basin, it is still possible to find pools of oil.
The grasses seem to work like a magnet, the edges of the marsh seared by oil.
The cut is more than superficial, but no one knows how deep the wound goes in what were some of Louisiana's most fragile wetlands long before the blowout in BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico.
"Our goal is to trap the oil here so we can go in and get it and not let it (go out) with the tides," Watson said.
Their work was helped in some ways by last weekend's weather, nature's dispersant.
In other ways, even that puny storm complicated matters, Watson explains, by pushing the oil farther into the marsh in some places.
"It's been a phenomenal undertaking to try to get all of it picked up," Eppley said.
At this point, it's not clear how long the fight will continue, or precisely how victory is defined.
"Being from the parish, we want to get it right," Watson said. "So we get as many people as we can to help us and try to get something done."
