A year of falling chips
Posted November 20, 2007 in Moving Beyond Oil, Reviving the World's Oceans, Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
Yesterday, the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation met for the second hearing on the oil spill we've had here in the last week. The state Legislature held its hearing last Thursday, where we heard from the ILWU that some employees of the contractor charged with spill response felt that company was understaffed, though they were not able to speak publicly without fearing for their jobs. Meanwhile the private contractor said he was just doing what he was told by the state, and the state should raise its standards if it wanted a better response. And we all learned alot about OSPR and its large binders of emergency response plans.
But there's a big difference between Sacramento and Washington, D.C., and it's not just the bomb-sniffing dogs. Yesterday was drizzly out at the Presidio, where doors for the hearing opened just ten minutes before the hearing started. I chatted with a park ranger about abalone diving, and then it was a bit of a reunion with staffers I hadn't seen since my days in DC in the late 1990s. There were flags, there was the mayor of San Francisco, and there was a wall of windows framing a view of the bay under discussion.
They got right down to business: have the Homeland Security mandates stretched the Coast Guard's resources too thinly? Why would it take the National Transportation Safety Board a year to complete its investigation? And if everyone agreed this was something that could have been prevented, why wasn't it? Call it a combination of working on Coast Guard and shipping issues for years and good staffing, but the Representatives had done their homework.
At the end of the day, even the Coast Guard Vice Admiral had to agree that something went terribly wrong on the deck of the Cosco Busan. Hundreds of ships turn right from the Port of Oakland and pass under the Bay Bridge every week, in foggy weather, and only this one hit it. Congress and the state are right to be worried about the uncoordinated response, especially since it sets a bad precedent for responses to other emergencies. But when recovering 20% of a spill is considered a great success, you've got to take a better look at your containment. The best containment is no spill at all.
Photo provided by Defenders of Wildlife, Ocean Conservancy, San Francisco Baykeeper, and SkyTruth, from image taken by the Radarsat-1 satellite, operated by MDA Geospatial Services Inc.
