Office of University Relations - Drew Wirwa

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Drew Wirwa (UTM ’06, UTK ’09) and other U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff members were at sea May 7 some 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. It was more than two weeks after the Deepwater Horizon explosion that occurred April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico. As they surveyed the waters, their worst fears were realized – they saw oil from the gushing well rolling in on the waves, headed toward the Chandeleur Islands.

This discovery opened a new chapter in Wirwa’s young career as assistant manager for the Breton, Delta and Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuges in Lacombe. The subsequent weeks saw Wirwa and countless others working to minimize wildlife and land damage along the Louisiana coast from the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

Wirwa’s preparation began early in life for the tragedy unfolding before him. He comes by his appreciation for wildlife management and the environment honestly as his father, Carl (UTK ’75), who attended UT Martin, is a 32-year veteran of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and is responsible for wildlife management areas in Dyer, Gibson and Crockett counties in West Tennessee. His brother, Nick (UTM ’03), is a biologist at St. Catherine’s Creek National Wildlife Refuge Complex in Natchez, Miss. Drew and Nick’s mother, Carol (UTM ’74, UTK ’75), a Crockett County Middle School librarian, isn’t involved in the wildlife management profession, but she rounds out the family’s UT Martin connection.

Wirwa earned his bachelor’s degree in natural resources management at UT Martin and his master’s degree in wildlife and fisheries at UT Knoxville. His graduate work focused on shorebird and waterfowl use of the Kentucky Reservoir during drawdown. While in Martin and Knoxville, he worked on wildlife refuges in the Student Career Experience Program (SCEP), a USFWS co-op program. After earning his graduate degree, he went to work in spring 2009 at Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Georgia as a wildlife refuge specialist. Four months later, he accepted his current position at the Southeast Louisiana Refuges Complex in Lacombe, located on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

Delta is a 49,000-acre Mississippi Delta marsh east of Venice and involves significant oil and gas management. He said that more than 60 special-use permits for oil and gas operations were issued on Delta in the recent year. The USFWS owns the surface rights, but it doesn’t own the mineral or subsurface rights. Some subsurface rights are owned federally by the Bureau of Land Management, while others are privately owned. “Oil companies can come in and mine those minerals, but we have to administer the surface resources and protect the refuge as much as possible,” he said. “So we do that through the special-use permit process.”

Breton, established in 1904 and the second oldest refuge in the National Wildlife Refuge System, is 1,100 acres post-Katrina and includes all of the Chandeleur Islands, a barrier island chain that runs north and south to the east of New Orleans. This is designated as a wilderness area, and much of USFWS’s work involves maintaining the wilderness characteristics of the islands. A pelican banding program is also in place at the refuge, which in 2010 banded 1,100 pelicans to monitor survival rates and dispersal. Wirwa said that 70 percent of Breton’s land base was lost during Hurricane Katrina.

In a strange coincidence, Wirwa’s regular duties were already interrupted before the Deepwater Horizon explosion with the cleanup of a 400-barrel oil spill that occurred in early April at the Delta Refuge. This overlapped with response to the Deepwater Horizon spill when it happened, so the USFWS was already in a lower-level response mode. When they learned of the Horizon spill, nobody understood the extent of the disaster, so the first response teams were small. “It wasn’t a concern initially, because we were told that there was no sign of oil released at all,” he recalled.

Wirwa counting brown pelican nests before the potential impact of incoming oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill.

The situation changed quickly as more about the oil spill became known. They knew that the oil was coming, so Wirwa’s first assignment “was to fly the Chandeleur chain and do (an) aerial survey of the seabird breeding colonies” as these birds begin nesting in April. “We were identifying the priority areas such as pelican nesting colony islands and getting those areas protected as much as we could, and that involved putting boom around them,” he said. Obtaining boom (floating barriers) and establishing protection around priority areas was accomplished in cooperation with British Petroleum (BP) contractors. The boom did play an important role in preventing oil from reaching the nesting colonies on Breton, Wirwa said.

The refuge staff’s role evolved in April and May as the scope of the disaster was better understood. Four to six staff members worked an average of 12 to 14 hours daily, seven days a week, beginning in April. Then came their first encounter with the oil May 7 at the Chandeleurs, and everything changed. “We were the only ones out there,” he recalled. “This is … 50 miles offshore, and we saw the oil actually rolling in. And there was boom out around this island, but … the waves were to the point where a lot of it was washing over. And we could just see streams of it coming in, and we watched it.” All he could describe was “a really helpless feeling” as he and his colleagues knew that much more oil was coming.

Impact from the oil began in mid-May when it started hitting the shoreline. Work from that point involved cleanup and maintaining the booms for the likely arrival of more oil as it was unknown when the well would be capped. This continued through August, when they started picking up booms “and really refining the cleanup process of the oil on the shoreline, in the marsh and on the beaches.”

Nothing in his background prepared Wirwa for what was happening. “I mean ‘helpless’ is the best way to describe it,” he said. “All we did that day (May 7) is just take pictures … and document everything as best we could. …” He added, “Trying to predict the next few months was just what we focused on, trying to predict what would happen and how to better mitigate these impacts.”

Wirwa making his way across a lagoon to inspect the status of 1,300 nesting brown pelicans at North Island, Breton NWR, May 3, 2010.

Although the oil well was finally capped in mid-July, life for Wirwa and other USFWS staff members isn’t completely back to normal. Some have returned to their regular duties, but he is among those still involved in cleanup operations for the Chandeleurs (as of early November). “The Chandeleurs were hit relatively hard by the oil patties that washed in, and so we’ve got a big crew of contractors … going out there every day that the weather permits,” he said, “and we’re going out there with them to identify areas that need cleaning and just working from north to south down the 22-mile island chain and getting the significant areas cleaned up as best we can. And that will continue more than likely for the next few months.”   Wirwa said that he learned much “from the day-to-day operations of the incident command system and how that works in a national disaster.” He added, “I guess in general, to step back, I really learned about the resiliency of the people down there in the gulf, as well as the ecosystem. It was interesting, but pretty spectacular to watch and be part of.” Nobody had seen anything like this spill before,  “But now we’ve got this experience. Yeah, I definitely feel like we’re much more capable of handling something like this if it happens again.”   As for the region’s wildlife, Wirwa said that much work is needed to determine the extent of the damage. “Researchers are currently determining … proportions or percentages of wildlife populations that were impacted,” he said. “Of course, we’ll be studying the … indirect effects or impacts for decades.”   Drew Wirwa uses adjectives such as “new,” “exciting” and “rewarding” to describe his work. He can now add “historic” to this list of descriptors, as he has been on the frontlines of helping America recover from one of her greatest environmental tragedies.