The stuff I saw immersed and lining at least a foot about the water level all along the reeds of the island felt sticky to the touch. It stained my fingertips red and made my hands sticky until I could properly wash them and also smelled like a gas station, which is probably obvious.

Once finding the oil thickly immersed in the reeds lining the island we went in search of other places the oil might have clung to during high tide. We didn’t have to look far to find pools of the red liquid lingering at the bottom of the island reeds about 10-15 feet inland from the low tide. We saw pools of the oil farther inland and also found the oil in a different consistency in the wet sand. There we found dollops of oil, about the size of a quarter or slightly larger or smaller that had congealed with the surrounding sand. Some of the tar balls that had washed farther into now dry sand were baking in the hot sun and started to liquify and blend farther into the sandy beach, making the oil virtually impossible to ever be removed from that area.

We went on to check out some booms crews had placed as recently as this morning and found the absorbant materials completely stained black from the oil they were attracting only a few feet from the fragile reeds. We saw booms covered in thick, dripping oil that partially clung to the booms and also appeared to be sliding back into the water.

There were a few sightings of dispersed oil in the water near South Pass, but looking in the water you’d never think that such a thick crude-like substance was lurking, just waiting to make contact with the booms like we were seeing.

Photos taken May 10, 2010 by NRDC, click for captions and more photos

Not too far inside the protective barrier of the booms, we saw dozens of gulls frolicing on a sand bar and some were diving outside of the boom barrier. As we headed back to Venice before sundown we continued to take note of the periodically oily-covered booms.

This recent brush with the BP oil spill felt like we were getting closer to seeing much, much more of the spill than we’ve seen in the 10 days we’ve been here and in my personal opinion, while there are crews out trying to fight the spill and place absorbant barriers wherever there appears to be a threat, there are many, many miles of marshland and coastline just in the Venice area alone that remain unprotected. Some of these areas appear to be essential channels for commerce and perhaps the booms would simply get in the way of the cargo ships and Army Corps dredging activities, but there’s marshland all around and no booms in sight in many places that seem like they’ll need the protection soon enough.

My friend Ana is pretty much obsessed with public transit and when you live in LA, that's a bizarre obsession since everyone gets around by car, but there are those lucky individuals who live close to the subway or main bus lines and swear by the efficiency.

Ana asked me a couple weeks ago to participate in the first ever Transit People race that was held this past weekend. The race asks teams to start from locations around the city and race to a final destination, all by using public transit to more or less elevate the fact that you can get around LA pretty easily using public transit. Transit People is also a charity that uses public transit to take inner city kids on field trips to the aquarium, natural history museum and numerous other LA attractions.

Our team was planning to start the race from the USC campus, so after meeting Ana at her apartment in Silverlake (sortof north LA), we headed to USC (south LA) via rail and bus, connected with the rest of our team, received our final coordinates and took off for the nearest bus. Turns out we almost missed the bus and everyone had to sprint for it. Not being a sprinter, this was mildly embarrassing, but we all made the bus which ended up taking us to the final destination without a transfer, but not before another rival team got on the same bus with us. Once we figured out they were also with Transit race, our team sketched out a strategy to jump off the bus and book it to our final destination, Heritage Square Park in east LA.

Sure the bus stop and park were maybe a little more than a half mile away, but again, we were sprinting and it was 75 degrees out already, and I swear, we were running uphill. Luckily, I was not the first to slow down, and thankfully the majority of the other team really never tried to catch us (they later referred to our team as "all fitness types"), which meant that we'd won the race, but for 30 minutes after we made it to the park, everyone on my team was still wheezing and most of us were still coughing. Everyone said it tasted like there was something in the air, like a fine coating of pollution, or as Ralph Wiggum describes it, it tasted like burning. More than 24 hours later, it still felt like I had something caught in my throat.

The type of air I inhaled after sprinting to Heritage Park and again to make the rail stop a couple hours later is the worst in the country and has been for decades. My colleague and an LA native, David Pettit, tells me how it felt like a knife was piercing his lungs after playing outside while he was growing up.

This was the first time I can remember breathing air like this. I'm lucky to live on the Westside of the city, near the ocean breezes that blow pollution inland, to hover over areas like east LA. It's a combination of weather patterns and the expansive pollution from cars, diesel trucks, trains, and stationary sources like power plants that contribute to this choking soup of air pollution. Who knows how much particulate matter I inhaled during those short sprints? What really concerns me is the kids who were at the park, putting on a talent show for us and their families from east LA. They have the rest of their lives ahead of them and are stuck breathing this toxic brew every day. 

I want to say we can fix this, but LA has dealt with smog stinging Angelinos' eyes and lungs for more than 50 years. And now we know it also kills 24,000 Californians annually or 15 people a day if you live in the LA air basin (page 4, the 5,400 premature deaths figure, citing CARB). We need to do better. East LA is home to some of the region's worst polluters and many minority families. Those families deserve to go outside and sprint if they want to without feeling like they're taking years off their lives.