ST. PETERSBURG
Lorraine Margeson answers the phone in the kitchen. “Hello, HON,” she says. On the line is a captain from a state wildlife agency with the latest news about the oil spill.
“Okay,” Margeson says. “Oily birds. Oily turtles. Call meee if you see any. PROMISE? You’re a sweetheart.”
Margeson, 53, is probably Tampa Bay’s best-known environmental activist. She is a pint-sized buzz saw. She cusses, she threatens, she shouts. She writes e-mails overflowing with capital letters and exclamation points. She is afraid of nobody except maybe her mother, who sometimes asks “Have you been smoking?” at which time Margeson answers by blaming her nicotine-fiend husband, Don, for the cancer-stick smell.
In good times and in bad, she is fired up about something. But the oil spill in the northern gulf has turned her high-energy personality up several notches. Coffee? She’ll take a gallon, black, and make it snappy. Sleep? She’ll sleep when she’s dead. If she has to make some lives miserable in the next few months, she is willing and able.
“I’m a giant pain in the a–,” she says. “That’s my M.O.”
Up in her giant second-story bedroom, an enormous computer sits on an enormous desk. Next to the computer, papers are neatly stacked. Next to the papers are files containing hundreds if not thousands of names she can call on a moment’s notice, which she often does. YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?
“We’re going to get TAR BALLS even if we don’t get an oil SLICK on the beach,” Margeson declares. She’s more or less shouting into the phone again.
Nobody knows what’s going to happen to Florida’s beaches. Will the oil ooze onto the state’s western shore? Or will the loop current sweep it south into the Keys and up Florida’s east coast? Whatever happens, Margeson is “DISGUSTED! THIS IS GOING TO BE A DISASTER!”
To continue reading:
Oil spill mobilizes ‘DISGUSTED’ environmental activist – St. Petersburg Times
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