Jimmy Stewart's 'Thunder Bay' — Hollywood Prophecy

In the 1953 movie “Thunder Bay,” Jimmy Stewart plays the complicated protagonist, Steve Martin, the hard-bitten, ex-navy oil engineer who built the first offshore oil platform off Louisiana in 1947. “The brawling, mauling story of the biggest bonanza of them all!” reads the Universal ad for the studio’s first wide-screen movie.

Much of the brawling by Stewart and his henchmen was against the local Cajuns who fished for a living. Their livelihood, it seemed obvious at the time, would soon vanish amidst a hellbroth of irreversible pollution. The movie covers a time period of barely one year yet ends on a happy note of conciliation as the fishermen reaped a bonanza almost as big as Jimmy’s itself. The oil structures had kicked in as artificial reefs and made possible a bigger haul of seafood than anything in these fishermen’s lifetimes.

Alas, brawling by the real life Jimmy Stewart characters later cranked up to a level that dwarfed anything in the movie–but against a much more fanatical, underhanded and devious foe: environmentalists.

If bona-fide science has crowned Global Warmists with ten foot dunce caps, then half a century of scientific evidence has crowned anti-offshore drilling activists with fifty foot dunce caps. Astoundingly, over the ensuing decades the verdict of this 1953 movie (that offshore oil drilling far from an environmental disaster was actually an environmental bonanza) has been pounded home with a vengeance. To wit:

With 3,203 of the 3,729 offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico off her coast, Louisiana provides almost a third of North America’s commercial fisheries. A study by LSU’s sea grant college shows that 85 percent of Louisiana’s offshore fishing trips target these structures. “Oil platforms as artificial reefs support fish densities 10 to 1000 times that of adjacent sand and mud bottom, and almost always exceed fish densities found at both adjacent artificial reefs of other types and natural hard bottom,” says a study by Dr Bob Shipp, professor at the Marine Sciences department of the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama, and currently, the vice-chair of the Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council. “Evidence indicates that massive areas of the northwestern Gulf of Mexico were essentially empty of snapper stocks for the first hundred years of the fishery. Subsequently, areas in the western Gulf have become the major source of red snapper, concurrent with the appearance of thousands of petroleum platforms.” (italics mine).

More recently, the red snapper catch from the northwestern Gulf (Louisiana, studded with oil platforms) is estimated 6 to 7 times greater (italics mine) than the catch from the eastern Gulf (bereft of oil platforms.)”

That this proliferation of seafood came because – rather than in spite – of the oil production rattled many environmental cages and provoked a legion of scoffers.

Amongst the scoffers were some The Travel Channel producers, fashionably greenish in their views. They read these claims in a book titled “The Helldiver’s Rodeo.” (and Ted Nugent’s blurb sure didn’t help against their scoffing!) The book described an undersea panorama that (if true) could make an interesting show for the network, they concluded, while still scoffing.

They scoffed as we rode in from the airport. They scoffed over raw oysters, grilled redfish and seafood gumbo that night. More scoffing through the Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s. They scoffed even while suiting up in dive gear and checking the cameras as we tied up to an oil platform 20 miles in the Gulf.

But they came out of the water bug-eyed and indeed produced and broadcast a Travel Channel program showcasing a panorama that turned on its head every environmental superstition against offshore oil drilling. Schools of fish filled the water column from top to bottom – from 6-inch blennies to 12-foot sharks. Fish by the thousands. Fish by the ton.

The cameras were going crazy. Do I focus on the shoals of barracuda? Or that cloud of jacks? On the immense schools of snapper below, or on the fleet of tarpon above? How ’bout this – WHOOOAA – hammerhead! We had some close-ups, too, of coral and sponges, the very things disappearing off Florida’s (that bans offshore oil drilling) pampered reefs. Off Louisiana, they sprout in colorful profusion from the huge steel beams – acres of them. You’d never guess this was part of that unsightly structure above. The panorama of marine life around an offshore oil platform staggers anyone who puts on goggles and takes a peek, even (especially!) the most worldly scuba divers. Here’s a video peek at this seafood bonanza.

And oh!…as a fanatical fisherman/scuba-diver I almost forgot to mention this trivial detail: the oil production platforms off Louisiana’s coast also produce 80 percent of the oil and 72 percent of the natural gas produced in the U.S.–and without causing a single major oil spill in half a century of this process. This record stands despite dozens of hurricanes – including the two most destructive in North American history, Camille and Katrina – repeatedly battering the drilling and production structures.