When Lousiana fisherman Robert Campo receives news of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he knows his life is about to change.

Robert Campo is the owner of Campo's Marina located in Shell Beach, Louisiana.  He's a fourth generation commercial fisherman and the great-grandson of the late Celestino Campo, the founder of Campo's Marina started in 1903.  He's the grandson of the late Frank Blackie Campo (a true legend) and the son of Frank J. Campo Jr.  Campo's Marina is the oldest family-owned business in St.Bernard parish and it's one of the top ten oldest family owned businesses that still exists today in Louisiana.  He owns and operates his oyster business with two oyster boats and a farm of nearly 1500 acres of oyster grounds.

This story originally aired June 23, 2017.

Story Transcript

I’m a fourth-generation commercial fisherman.  I lived an oil spill experience in St. Bernard, Louisiana, and I am the owner of Campo’s Marina, me and my father and my brother.  Our business has been in business for a hundred and seventeen years, so we've been around awhile. 

I come from an Isleños heritage.  That’s what most people are in our parish.  So here goes. 

On April 20th of 2010, no knowledge of any rig explosions or anything, I do what I do most days. I also own two oyster boats and I farm fifteen hundred acres of oyster ground. 

So I leave out Shell Beach, in my oyster boat and I got about an hour and twenty-minute ride to my oyster leases in False Mouth Bay.  I get over there, and I’m getting that way and I’m watching a beautiful sunrise that morning, and I get to my oyster leases and we try to catch a fifty-sack quota a day.  We set ourselves on a load limit. 

So we catch our fifty sacks and we return back to Shell Beach and we unload the boat and head back to my dock, and I was parking my slip and we’re cleaning the boat and everything and I shut it down.  I walk into my truck and I remember my phone ringing.  I was still on a flip phone age back in 2010. 

So I stopped and I grabbed my phone out of my pocket.  I didn’t recognize the number and it was a New York number.  So I was like, “Man, who the hell is this?” 

So I answered the phone, I said hello and it’s Anne Thompson on the phone.  Anne Thompson, if you don’t know who she is, she's from NBC Nightly News.  So she tells me, she says like, man, she's going a mile minute.  So I’m trying to process all this stuff at the same time -- you know, it’s a long day. 

So anyway she says, “Hi, this is Anne Thompson from NBC Nightly News,” blah, blah, blah.  I mean, she's going on and on and on and on about the oil rig blowing up and how is this going to affect your business, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Slow down, slow down, slow down.”  I said, “What oil rig blew up and where are we talking about?  What’s going on?” 

She said, “What do you mean exactly?” 

I said, “I have no knowledge of nothing.  None of this.” 

So she goes into telling me how the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in a massive explosion.  Eleven people were still missing and they were trying to put out this massive fire, and it gets worse than that.  She said the pipe that the oil was coming out off just broke off at the surface of the Gulf of Mexico floor.  So this is where my day starts to take a downward spiral. 

So I’m standing there, I remember standing in the middle of the street and the wind is blowing out of the southeast about a ten-miles-an-hour breeze, and it’s blowing right in my face.  So I asked her, I said, “How far off shore is this rig, this oil rig?” 

And she says, “Approximately fifty miles.”  So you do the math at fifty miles, ten-to-fifteen-mile-an-hour winds off the south, we got big trouble in little China. 

So I get home and television is just lit up with this coverage of the oil spill.  So I’m looking at the television and I’m trying to pay attention to the weather, because the weather is the most important thing right now.  And the weatherman says that it’s going to be blowing ten to fifteen miles an hour out of the southeast for the next two weeks.  I said, “Oh, this is not good.” 

So shortly thereafter, she asks… when I was on the phone that time she wanted to do an interview.  She wanted to know if I'd be up to do an interview.  I said sure.  So we did the interview a couple of days later. 

So I’m getting back to this television stuff and all, I’m watching this.  I remember saying this wind coming up the southeast in April was really not unusual because in the month of April, as fishermen, we look for to bring the brown shrimp larvae in and getting them up into the estuaries and that’s how we have our shrimping season, our first shrimping season, May season. 

Well, along comes with the shrimp larvae is coming this oil and, as it’s getting closer to shore, I remember President Obama giving the okay to start spraying dispersant on this oil.  Well, they sprayed the dispersant and they're spraying it from aircraft and airplanes, and God knows other kind of ways they're spraying it out there, to sink this oil.  So in my mind, out of sight is out of mind. 

Well, we started seeing massive fish kills.  A lot of those menhaden, mullet, speckled trout, bull reds, bull drums, and this is going on for miles.  Saw dead sea turtles, saw dead crabs that were full of eggs that was floating with these dead fish, blue crabs.  We saw dead porpoises about three or four feet long.  There was quite a few of them and I said, “Man, this is just depressing.”

So myself and the other fisherman, we want answers.  So we have a town hall meeting in Chalmette, Louisiana.  We have it in Saint Bernard, we have a town hall meeting.  And there's local, state, federal government agencies, there's BP representatives and, I swear to you, it was like a question that would come to these guys sitting up on chairs like this on the stage, they would all be looking at each other and nobody had an answer.  It was kind of like a dog chasing his tail.  It was pitiful. 

So one of the BP reps that was asked said, “We’re gonna make this right.  We’re gonna hire y’all’s boats.”  And so they did.  We stretched out a hundred and sixty feet of boom, oil boom to try to contain this oil from getting into the marshes. 

So we did that.  Put over a hundred and sixty miles out.  And daily, we had to go out with our boats and maintain it.  But due to the tide coming in and the strong winds, the ropes would pop and we had to go put all the stuff back together and it was a nightmare.  Needless to say, it was a nightmare, a real, real nightmare.  And still dead fish.  Every day is dead fish.  Miles and miles and miles of dead fish. 

And being an oyster fisherman, I’m looking at all these dead fish and, so if these fish are dead like this, our oysters don’t have a shot, and they didn’t.  It killed miles and miles of reefs that, after Hurricane Katrina, it was just so full of oysters it was just unbelievable.  The abundance of seafood that we had after Katrina was just, it was mind-blowing. 

And being a shrimper, also I could tell you this because I lived it.  We lost everything for Katrina: houses, business, everything.  But the seafood was there and we knew that we could survive.  As long as we had seafood, we’d survive.  But now, this comes along and all the seafood is dead.  We rebuilt, but we got dead seafood. 

So I'd like to think that I’m a strong person, that I can handle a lot and I can endure a lot, but I tell you, this is wearing me down.  It was getting the best of me.  And working for them every day, I’m seeing this.  I couldn’t do this in front of my crew, but, man, at night it was killing me. 

And this is what happened to the oyster industry.  The combination of dispersant, oil, the river water that they turned loose out of the Bonnet Carré Spillway, I guess it was a combination of all these things.  It’s been nearly seven years, I guess, since this thing happened and I could tell you, I could take you to oyster reefs right now and they still haven't produced an oyster since this happened. 

I don't know why.  I can’t explain it.  Scientists don’t know why.  Biologists don’t know why.  And had it not been for the oyster fishermen that’s in St. Bernard Parish putting out fresh concrete and limestone, we wouldn’t have an oyster industry today.  And what would Louisiana be without seafood? 

So Louisiana is near and dear to me.  It’s in my heart.  I was born and raised on these bayous all my life.  I tell people all the time that I have saltwater in my veins.  That’s what my blood type is, it’s saltwater. 

Again, Louisiana is just a unique spot, unique place to live in.  I couldn’t see myself doing anything else but fishing for a living and I don't know what I would do without being on the bayous every day.  It’s hard to think and it’s hard to process that you might have to go do something else.  It makes you mad and, at the same time, it makes you cry, you've got all this emotions going through your mind. 

One thing I could tell you about Louisiana fishermen is they're very proud people.  They're hardworking, they endure weather that most people wouldn’t even go outside in.  I've been out there and I've done it myself a bunch of times.  But, at the end of the day, and I'll close with this, what makes me do what I do is because Louisiana is home.  The end.