Oil on Water
So what happened here over the past week should remind us all that we simply don't know how to make our oil dependence both safe and affordable. At 8:30 AM last Wednesday, a container ship rammed the Bay Bridge in a fog. Over 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel spewed into the water within 30 minutes. Shortly after the spill, according to a newspaper report, "Capt. Peter McIsaac, president of the San Francisco Bar Pilots, boarded a boat and headed for the Cosco Busan, then just off Treasure Island. He said oil was pouring out of a gash in the ship.
'I've never seen oil going into the water like that' he said."
But in spite of what McIsaac saw with his own eyes, the Coast Guard accepted the initial report from the crew of the ship that it had spilled only 140 gallons. Only at 4:49 -- eight hours after the ship struck the bridge, did Coast Guard investigators realize that the spill was the largest in the Bay in a decade.
What this meant was a disastrously slow response that failed to contain the oil before it spread, closing beaches, killing sea birds, contaminating wetlands, and putting the opening of the Dungeness crab season at risk. It was two hours before any serious effort was underway. And even then, because the response wasn't scaled to the real problem, it didn't work.
Once the oil had spread, the only hope became the labor-intensive process of getting to every possible contamination site and cleaning up the oil before it could sink into the sand, be ingested by marine life, and enter the food chain. That takes people -- lots of them. And thousands of volunteers showed up to help. First they were told they would need to be trained. Then they were told that there was no capacity to train most of them. Some people were even handcuffed for taking the initiative to help with the cleanup. (Use a cotton swab, go to jail.)
The reasons for preventing citizens from getting involved? There's one good one and one (from my perspective) terrible one. Taking care of contaminated birds is a technically challenging part of oil spill cleanup -- and it ought to be reserved for those with the proper training, or volunteers could do more harm than good. Similarly, deploying oil spill booms is professional work for those with training. But capturing oil with absorbent materials and bagging it before it sinks into a tidal pool? Surely, the more hands at this task, the better.
Well, say the authorities, bunker fuel is toxic, so it would be too risky to let people clean it up without training. But, of course, if bunker fuel is toxic, and it sinks into the beaches, instead of adults wearing gloves picking it up, children in bare feet will be tromping through it next summer. If bunker fuel is that toxic we ought to have double-hull rules for ships that carry it. If bunker fuel is that toxic we ought to have tougher air pollution regulations on the ships that burn it, emitting large quantities of partially burned oil as fine particulates. In short, if we are serious about the health risks of bunker fuel, we ought to be doing lots of things that we aren't to prevent human exposure -- rather than coming in after it spills in the Bay and telling the public, "don't try to help, you might get hurt" (more likely, the real motivation is "we might get sued").
OK, that's how bureaucracies work. They freeze up when something goes awry, worry about the wrong things, and tie everything in knots. But that's precisely why the whole "oil spill clean up" notion is sort of a farce. If it won't work with a very modest spill in very quiet water in very good weather in a highly organized and accessible location, is there any real meaning to the concept elsewhere?
Well, we found out yesterday, sadly, when a small tanker and eleven other ships broke apart in a fierce storm on the Black Sea. A dozen sailors lost their lives, oil killed thousands of sea birds, and the spill did serious long-term damage to the ecosystems in the area.
Everyone agrees that this spill was caused by human errors. The Russian government blames the ship owners for ignoring storm warnings, and threatens to prosecute; environmental groups blame the government for relying on inadequately designed, shallow-water vessels to carry oil across the extremely treacherous Black Sea.
But what's the official oil industry line? Take a look at this U.S. government website discussing how to clean up oil in the Black Sea -- all of the pictures of clean-up technology in use show calm, sunny days. Which would be fine if tankers and ships only sailed in perfect weather. They don't. Which is why we ought to be honest and admit that our reliance on oil brings with it an unavoidable, and unmitigatable, ecological and economic price.
Instead, we get rhetoric like this from a BP website about the pipeline between the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean: "BTC Co has developed a comprehensive oil spill response capability. However unlikely an oil spill may be BTC Co is committed to responding rapidly and effectively by developing trained personnel and specialised equipment appropriate to the location and scale of any incident."
Doublespeak and more doublespeak. That's why we shouldn't let the oil industry drill in environmentally sensitive places, why tankers ought to have double hulls, why merchant ships should be crewed by properly trained sailors, and why we should do everything we can to prevent oil on water -- because once it is there, we are almost powerless.
