On 20 April 2010, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded. A photograph of an oil-soaked pelican came to epitomise the environmental disaster and helped galvanise the clean-up.
On 20 April 2010, the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded after a surge of natural gas blasted through its concrete core, spillingWhen the world first learned about the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Win McNamee, chief photographer for Getty Images, was stuck thigh-deep in pluff mud, an umber quicksand-like miasma, on East Grand Terre Island, Louisiana. McNamee was starting another 14-hour day, working to illustrate the depth and breadth of the crisis.
With its Brobdingnagian bill and lithe neck, the pelican is not the obvious choice for a galvanising symbol. But there's more here than meets the eye. McNamee describes the now-iconic images as"tragic combination of beautiful light and a horrific subject". But personally, McNamee felt an"overwhelming sense of sadness".
Viewers' empathetic responses to a lone brown pelican heightened public pressure on the Obama administration and BP to stop the leak, he says. It is estimated that 10% of all brown pelicans in the northern Gulf of Mexico died because of the oil spill in restoration, part of the global settlement that the Department of Environmental Protection reached with the Department of Justice in 2015.
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