So, yeah. I took a rest in place. It feels like I’ve been down here forever. Between rests in place, stand down days last week and just knowing I’m like 12 days from going home. Anyway. I was doing the SWACO sand cleaning stuff, kind of B.S. if you ask me, because the sand that was being clean was already labeled as “fine for human use” by DEQ, but hey, it gave me things to do. I also did a few FRAT missions. Those are the simple ones where you go to a site, either by car or boat, and collect a sample of something that might be oil-based. You put it in jars and drop it off. Simple as cake, even if I can’t really make cake. But hey, same thing. I did a few of those and team lead a few missions where the ESI Observers, people that answer to BP observed/audited me. It happened twice at the beach cleaning, and I did “awesome” with no room for improvement.

Now to the fun stuff. I’m doing a “special assignment,” a task working with people from the United States Geological Survey (www.usgs.gov). Entrix moved mine and one of the other sampler’s rest in place days forward and shortened them so we could be put on two separate teams to lead. So, USGS went out while the oil was still spilling and in the five states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and surveyed 70 sites. Now we’re going back to 50 of them, well 12 in Louisiana that came back as interesting, or had a bit of oil.  I lead a team yesterday that did one of these sites, and the mission was kind of thrown together at the last minute AND I had an auditor, AND had to do quality control samples. Doing the Quality Control (QC) samples pretty much triples the amount of samples we need to take and makes the time on site a lot longer.  As far as things I could control, we did fine, so that was a plus. We drove to two sites to take samples on a beach. It was easy but long, and the amount of samples was just… too many.

Then today was supposed to be a stand down day, but Rob, my coordinator, called me up and said he wanted me to come to the command center to train a new person for the job and to do head up another team. So, I came in, met the guy, helped train them, got supplies and drove out to New Iberia. We’re doing a boat trip tomorrow, so that should be fun, and unlike most boat trips I’ve done as a FRAT mission I have to collect a sample when I get there. But it shouldn’t be too many bottles, unless they make me do another quality control, but I don’t think they will. Hopefully, I mean, its what, quarter past nine and I haven’t been told that I need to or to not do it, and I’ve been told to assume to not collect them, but chances are I will have to, because I’m a good sampler and will call in the morning to double check. Awesome. I need to write in this more, it does help me organize time, and its easier to write it all out then to try to talk it at people. Yep.