The Scariest Words In The World

“I’m from the government and I’m here to help”. Yea, it’s an old joke but it’s appropriate for this post.

Let me introduce you to Kenny DiNero. He owns a bait and fuel dock in Ocean Springs and runs a couple of shrimp boats. I sat down with him this morning to talk about where the oil spill has put him and his business and what he told me was not pretty. I expected that because his business is at the nexus of everything hurt by the spill. Shrimping was banned so his boats had nothing to do. The charter business tanked because fishing was banned. Fishing tournaments were cancelled, and they were big ones.

One sad fact tells the tale. Yesterday, July 21, the shop brought in $214. That’s it. It was apparent that wasn’t going to come close to making his monthly nut.

So, he goes to the government to apply for remuneration for the business he’s lost. As he tells it, the person he spoke with couldn’t do anything relative to lost sales for bait and fuel, but he could help him file a claim on the two boats. The government needed a bunch of financial records including tax returns from 2007, 2008 and 2009. He pulls together what they need, delivers that to them and waits. After a while he called to find out what was going on. Kenny was told that he needed to resubmit all the paperwork again because the first set was filed away in an archive somewhere. Not a problem because he had copies. He sent them in and waited some more. So the short story is that almost a month has gone by and he’s yet to see a dollar, but the government rep said he should get a check in August.

That’s only part of the story that he told me for just over a half hour this morning in front of my camera. As he talked, it became clear that his situation is effected by a bunch of situations set in motion when the well blew. What came quickly clear to me is that Kenny DiNero is one sharp, hard working cat with a sly sense of humor even though he didn’t smile much or laugh at all. His situation wasn’t even remotely humorous.

I can’t even start to retell his story because it’s incredibly complex, involves things that as an outsider I don’t understand and the outcome is still unknown. That present me with a problem I mulled over at lunch and during the short drive back to my hotel. After watching the interview as it was transferred from tape to my computer I realized that I had to use all of the interview. All 35 minutes of minutes. It’s a thought that might make some news field producers and documentarians look for tall buildings to jump off of. I can’t do it any other way. To leave out any part of it would be to ignore an important part of the jigsaw puzzle he’s living in. It would alter the context of what he’s going through. It wouldn’t be his story any more. It would be the story that I wanted to tell about him, and it wouldn’t be the truth, the whole truth.He also tells it very, very well.

So I’m going to violate every rule of video production and run all of it. From his answer to my first question to when a dog that adopted him after Katrina that he named “Pirate” jumped up on the bench next to him and the interview ended, you will hear everything that he said to me. I will cut video away to b-roll periodically to show some of the things he talks about but his audio will be complete and uncut. Since I asked questions off-mic, I’ll use full screen graphics for them.

The good news is that Kenny DiNero is very articulate and tells his story well. He sounds good too. I spent the afternoon and early evening adding graphics and b-roll to his story and I don’t think that if you care about what’s happening in the Gulf, you won’t be bored. But if you are, remember that I didn’t come down here to remake Caddyshack.

Coming up…

Dispersant, friend or foe.

UPDATE: Corrected the date when Kenny submitted his claim. The original article said that months had passed since he submitted his claim. In fact, he submitted it at the beginning of July. Also corrected his gross revenue number for the day described, which my weevil filled brain remembered incorrectly.