The Brockovich Report

Revisiting the Spill
Remember Exxon Valdez?

Who? Exxon Valdez, now called Sea River Mediterranean, oil tanker built by National Steel and Shipbuilding of San Diego, runs aground.

What? 11 million gallons of crude oil escapes into the Gulf of Alaska

Where? Prince William Sound, fouling 790 miles of shoreline within Prince William Sound oiled, 200 miles of which is classified as heavily oiled and in the Kenai Peninsula-Kodiak region, more than 2,400 miles of shoreline are found to be oiled. Block Island, Green Island, Sawmill Bay, Smith Island, *(EVOS Restoration Website)

When? March 24 1989

Why? 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 250 bald eagles, two dozen Orcas, billions of salmon, loons, three species of cormorants, harlequin ducks, harbor seals, herring and a partridge in a pear tree.

Exxon's scientists point to the recovery of "bald eagles, black oystercatchers, murres, pink and sockeye salmon, and river otters" and claim that the ecosystem has recovered.

The rest of the world (i.e. all of the scientists, environmentalists and study groups which are not paid by Exxon) feel the area has not yet recovered. Of course, there's no really optimal way to clean up the thin sheet of oil and the mousse (emulsified mixture of oil and sea water). Burning pollutes the air; using the boom to corral and contain is laborious. only marginally effective, and terribly inefficient; dispersants contaminate the water and food supply of indigenous species; and skimming is an equipment and manpower intensive process which is only successful under optimum conditions of calm seas, fresh, fluid oil and well-orchestrated teamwork. The NOAA's National Ocean Service study suggests "incomplete recovery (as of 1998) include species differences in infaunal populations, different grain size structures and lower population abundances at oiled sites..." (I had to look up infaunal. It means species that live on the ocean floor.)

Why am I bringing this up 18 years later?

It's the one month anniversary of the San Francisco Bay Oil spill. Call it a celebration of sorts, not that it's celebratory. Not with today's news of 66,043-110,000 barrels leaking from the Hong Kong-registered tanker in South Korean waters.

At least the cold weather froze the South Korean spill, making recovery and reclamation easier.

Some things are looking better. All those scientific minds pointed toward oil spill clean up have resulted in a improved technology--a mechanical skimmer whose surface is grooved to pick up more oil–and is scraped completely clean on each rotation. Activated carbon plays a part. It's a good thing technology is improving because the potential of the San Francisco Oil spill is just as bad as ever. Bad for the harbor seals. Bad for the sea lions. Bad for the herring, steelhead and Chinook salmon, and innumerable species. Bad for San Francisco. Bad for all of us.

58000 gallons were spilled from the Cosco Busan out of Port of Oakland. How much oil was recovered is not known. What is known is that it will take a long time for the ecosystem to recover, but optimists hope that the ecosystem can absorb the damage.

There's the rub.

Certainly the world has a balance. Certainly there have been instances of oil in the ecosystem in a natural situation, and the world wagged on. But the world is different now from any other time in history. Humans put an added stress on the ecosystem, and there's only so much natural absorption any ecosystem can sustain before homeostasis can no longer be maintained.

So come on scientists and nautical engineers It's time to put your thinking caps on and help us clean up. Find new ways, better ways. Boat designers, it's time to engineer ships which won't leak. If we can self-seal a tire, why not a ship's hold? Come on alternative fuel developers. Let's find a way to float our boats and run our cars which does not require massive oil transportation and consumption.

Come on purveyors of the new technologies. We believe in you. We have to. You're all we have.