But you’re proving my point with your acceptance & tolerance of the situation.
I agree with you on the Mercury, MTBEs… not to mention plain ol’ phosphates from fertilizing all the golf courses that ring the Bay.
But really, oil slicks have a visual - visceral - impact which galvanizes public opinion. If people cared more - even you - our representatives in Sacramento would author legislation to prevent such occurances of blatant pollution, and (given good advice & research) would add some other relevant bits as well.
You just sound jaded.
Every part per million matters. My kids love to go fishing.
I did a lot of reading on PBDEs wrt their possible implication in autism. My laboratory was intested in autism causes. My dad was a player in the chemical industries when PBDEs were being introduced. He told me, pretty straight out, the industry was demanding flame retardants. The chemical industries came up with PBDEs, and others. The PBDEs were cheap, and worked as flame retardants. They are chemically very close to PCB95, which is the most toxic of the Lake Michigan PCBs from the 1970s that caused all those birth defects. As they were not consumed by people, they were unregulated, and deployed on a massive scale. Every piece of fabric. Every piece of foam. Every infant toy.
Now we know PBDEs accumulate in biological tissue. And their accumulation is already large enough to cause thyroid dysfunction in many people. And it is expressed at very high levels in mother’s breast milk. It is totally disgusting, and will impact millions of Americans, and there is no uproar. It was banned a few years ago, and you know what? Even today you cannot easily obtain the chemical to test its toxic impacts. But if you want to use it as a flame retardant, it is available by the barrel.
And there are at least a half dozen other comparable stories. The mercury in the Bay comes from dentist offices. From their sinks. Dentists thought the mercury pouring down their sinks was insignificant. It was not, and was almost wholly responsible for the mercury levels in our fish.
Overfishing…I lived in Baltimore in the 1990s. First, it was oysters. The oyster fishermen lobbied every year to maximize takes. Every year the biolgists warned that the populations were being damaged by the takes. The legislators took a compromise. The oysters vanished. Then the crabs followed - the famous Chesapeake blue crabs. Less than 10 years later, gone. I used to grab then at low tide with a seining net as a child, now they are essentially extinct in that part of the world.
In the Bay Area starting in the late 1990s, the same overfishing played out nearly exactly the same. First with the rockfish. Then the salmon.
One can go on and on about how the enrivonment has been irrevocably altered by humans. So when it comes to assessing damage and/or blame from 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel, I say, this is going to be a problem for a time from a few days to a month or so. And we are fu3king the world over so badly from year to year (and the human race) that I just cannot get excited about it.
And , unfortunately for them and all the sea life, the Black sea has not strong currents, there is just a small water exchange with other seas (the mediterranean, and it takes aprox a thousand years to have a complete change of water) and most of all Turkish and former Soviet Union states have not enough money and will to cure the whole situation.
I’m sad. Seems the seas/oceans are endangered “species”.
I’ll revive this thread in about two months and we’ll play a game of “find the oil”. I predict it will be impossible.
There was a big oil spill in the North Atlantic on a coastline about 6-7 years ago. It occurred during a winter storm. No cleanup was necessary. The storm churned the oil into droplets small enough they were irrelevant. The same will happen here.
If you are referring to the Sea Empress disaster, that happened on my bit of coast and we are still finding oil in places like sand horizons , under rocks etc and every now and again bits of it still comes to the surface… so saying it was all dispersed because of the winter storms is a bit ingenuous to say the least.
and if you are talking about the Brear wreck in Shetland, much of the light oil was blown ashore and poisoned the sensitive sub-arctic islands. The heavier stuff sank to the bottom and smothered the benthic organisms so badly that there was a catastrophic drop in bird breeding success the following year which has’nt fully recovered yet… so wrong again.
I’m really sorry to hear about this and I don’t really think that any way that you look at it can it be contrived as “not that big a deal.” Yes, it’s all relative. But this oil spill is horse sh*t and a big deal for the simple reason that it was even possible. Those ships leave Oakland for the Pacific all the time–it should be impossible for human error to allow this poisoning, even if historically speaking this poisoning isn’t as bad as others. As Admiral Rickover said, we must improve over time, constantly raising our standards. And for the most part we are. Americans are better stewards of water bodies than we have been. So that’s why this is so galling. Sorry, you guys up there. I used to live right on the Great Highway. It’s a gorgeous place. A bummer any way you slice it.
If every gallon of gasoline used in the Bay Area resulted in an average of 1 100th of one milliliter of spill because of
incomplete combustion
two-stroke small engine usage
spills at the pump
Then every day, the Bay Area is released an amount of fuel into the environment that is equal in magnitude to the Cosco Busan spill.
Of course different issues arise when the oil is concentrated, but in the long run it will be diluted into a fraction of a percent increase in the Bay Area’s petroleum-related pollution for a year.
I must suppose you’re right. You’re obviously a very intelligent guy. A tiny splash at the Arco in Livermore, as an example, though it will eventually taint ground water, seems incomparable–but en masse some damage is done.
You remind us that we’re all jaded because a million little injustices occur everyday and we fail to become outraged because we are inured to them. It’s a valid point and I’m definitely guilty.
It seems to me, however, that it would be easier to double-line a ship (because there are few of them and it’s cheap), than to ween Americans off the petroleum economy (because there are many and it might be expensive at first). The latter done recklessly might destroy our entire economy, so I think it’s more of a longterm–and therefore, unfortunately, ignorable–goal.
So I encourage you to keep on it, blakestah. We could use a sharp mind like yours to keep the rest of us honest.
