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Tab Benoit says he’s been warning anyone who would listen about the dangers of careless oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico.

Unfortunately, the Louisiana-born blues guitarist said his protests fell mainly on deaf ears, as the lure of quick profits and sound economic times drowned his voice in a sea of cash.

It took a disaster like the BP oil spill that, according to researchers, is dumping up to 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of crude oil into the Gulf each day, the equivalent of at least 1.7 million gallons.

Benoit, who took to the stage on Saturday in the pre-headliner spot at the Thunder Bay Blues Festival, said while the current disaster has made the most noise, it has its roots in policies forged during the Depression Era.

“The problem comes from 80 years ago,” Benoit said with a Cajun drawl in an exclusive interview with tbnewswatch.com. “In the late ‘20s the state of Louisiana, with the advice from the federal government, sold all of its coastal wetlands to oil companies. And since the late ‘20s they’ve been cutting the place up and digging it up and redirecting the Mississippi River, and all of these things to make it easier to produce oil from that area.

“What you’re seeing right now is just another example of the damage. We’ve been dealing with this stuff for 80 years. None of this is really new. The problems just get bigger and bigger.”

Benoit, born Nov. 17, 1967 in Baton Rouge, La., said a blues career was the furthest thing from his mind in the mid-1980s, when he went to aviation school to learn how to be a pilot.

After getting his licence be began working for the oil companies, flying back and forth along the Gulf coast, and said it didn’t take long for the damage being done to make itself easily evident.

A member of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame, Benoit is the founder of Voice of the Wetlands and in 2009 received the Governor’s Award as the state’s conservationist of the year.

While he’s not against drilling for oil, it has to be done properly to avoid environmental disasters like the current spill.

“I’m just saying there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way. And the way that they’ve been able to get away with that has been the wrong way,” he said. “The things that I’ve been saying for the last 20 years have been the same things. But nobody wanted to believe it until something like this happened. People call you a conspiracy theorist or all these other bad names ... But this was never a theory. Everything I know came from me seeing it with my own eyes.”

Benoit claims there are as many 27,000 improperly capped and abandoned oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, but that the public’s apathy, the oil companies’ greed and government indifference means little has been done about it and little likely will ever be done about it.

This makes Benoit angry.

“Here’s one hole that’s blown out that’s got a third of the Gulf closed off from fishing. We could definitely kill the Gulf with what we’ve got ... The problem is all of this is late. We could have been way ahead of the game. And think in 2010, with the way that we can communicate with each other through the Internet and worldwide communications ... we should be way ahead of the game,” he said.

“But when you let big business and government run away with the ball, this is what happens. I lay the blame on us because as the United States, our constitution starts with these three words: ‘We the people.’ And we the people are supposed to be involved in government. That’s what freedom is.”

BP is attempting yet again to cap the gushing well, an effort expected to take anywhere from three to six days. The company is capturing up to 15,-000 barrels a day and hope to raise that number by about 50 per cent or more.