Delio Martinez, before an interview with the 'New York Daily News'

New York Daily News photo credit: Howard Simmons

After graduating from the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training Academy for Buildings (BEST4B – 2009), Delio was recruited by an environmental remediation staffing company which came to SSBx to recruit potential employees for the BP oil spill in the Gulf. 

As of April 2011, Delio lives in the Bronx, Norwood Heights, and works in construction, renovating a Saint John's Hospital in Queens. 

An article about his work down South was published in the New York Daily News in late spring. We interviewed him a few days before...

“When you arrive, given the images you see in the media, you expect to see a lot of oil everywhere, wildlife covered in a sticky mess, so I was expecting to get real dirty.

Actually it was not what I expected or what I imagined.

When you first arrived, it looked relatively normal. It was when we were asked to go out into the Barrier Islands that we saw the damage. The islands form a barrier, as the name implies, so this is where the real oil mess was accumulated.

We were engaged mostly in product recovery – stuff was washing up on shore, we were basically shoveling it, putting it in bags, shoveling it some more, and putting it on a barge which would transport it to a place where whatever could be salvaged, was salvaged, and then whatever oil could be re-processed was processed again.

They wouldn't let us mess with any wildlife – whenever we came across wildlife, we would mark it, whether it was alive or dead, for those who had the expertise to deal with. Then we would mark the sand, with a branch in the sand, mark that there was wildlife there, and our supervisor would then contact wildlife rescue.

We came across pieces of the rigging itself – we would inform the supervisor, and they would deal with that as well.

And we recovered loads of petrol, Mississippi crude... There's a constant wind blowing and moving the toxins around – and when it comes to petrol, there are a few things that can harm you, especially methyl benzene, the fumes – you can't smell them, but if you're exposed for a long time, it can lead to disastrous results, harm reproduction.... And the weather, the weather wasn't helping – very hot and humid – if you exert yourself, you have to hydrate, be on the lookout for your co-workers.

We weren't allowed to speak to the public because they feared some members of the public would confuse you with BP, feel that you were directly involved in the BP mess. But we got a good reception – people were very welcoming.

I left the Bronx, I was venturing way out, and I met a lot of people from the Gulf, we developed a rapport with people from all places. I learned about the impact from a local standpoint - that something like that could cause economic problems – I learned especially about the impact on the jobs – their livelihoods depended on the sea. There were jobs that were affected, and lives, I believe 12 lives were lost. This disaster also created jobs, and the people I worked with got jobs and were also involved in giving back, trying to restore their community – just like what we do in the Bronx.

A lot of people were being sent back that weren't from there – and I was one of the people selected to stay to train people locally. I guess I stood out because I wanted to apply what I had learned at BEST. I was very interested in the environment, and it was an opportunity also for me to also give back.

They felt that: why hire people from out of state when you have people from in state? It's an impoverished area – so they were hard hit anyway – they should have gotten as much work as much as possible locally. Hey I totally respected that perspective - it's obvious that the locals were clearly very available and obviously capable of doing the cleanup.

At the same time, while I was there, I never met anyone else involved in anything like the training program I'd been involved in in the Bronx - aside from people from New York – there were a lot of us from New York. Probably all of us with this training were from New York.

Actually what occurred was that it became somewhat of a frenzy – we started going through these HAZWOP trainings, the company was opening up a training area and they were training people by the loads. They weren't prepared – people didn't have the background, but once the opportunity arrived, they stepped up to the plate and got the certifications they needed to get the job done. People wanted to learn, gain the necessary skills.

Pollution is everywhere – there should be programs like BEST everywhere locally so that they can be prepared to draw from the local population during disasters like this, invest back into the community. That's part of what BEST tries to do in the Bronx and everyone should have that opportunity to gain the skills to get jobs involved in restoring their own communities.