Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
says great risk to the bay from commercial shipping remains, because the
deadline for ships to be fitted with double hulls that provide on-board
containment is still years away. Another problem is that San Francisco bar
pilots—who guide foreign ships through the bay—must rely on naviga-
tional screens displayed in other languages.
Birds are generally the most visible victims of oil spills. During the
Cosco Busan
incident, about 3,000 birds perished, though some estimates
put the number much higher. When people saw that the scale of the disas-
ter was much greater than officials could handle, they rushed to clean oil
off beaches and riprap, and rescue oiled birds. Birder Lisa Owens Viani
remembers her sense of shock at the scene: “The morning after, the shore-
line felt desolate, like a war zone. Huge gobs of tar were washing up at the
water's edge; it took four or five of us to haul these gobs out of the water
with sticks and bag them. Most of the birds we rescued in Richmond were
already exhausted, hunkered down in the riprap or high marsh, and pretty
easy to catch.” The volunteers enlisted the help of bicyclists and joggers on
the shoreline, some of whom ended up driving the suffering avians to the
International Bird Rescue Research Center north of Vallejo.
After such spills, staff at the center work to keep the oiled birds hy-
drated and warm. Once stabilized, the birds get a series of washes (with
Dawn dish soap), rinses, and blow dries. Those that survive this stressful
process are then transferred to outdoor ponds and aviaries, and when
deemed healthy, the birds are released back to a nonoily part of the bay.
For two weeks following the
Cosco Busan
spill, volunteers returned to
the shoreline to try to save as many lives as they could. Recalls Owens
Viani, “We worked quietly in teams of two in the hot sun, the smell of
bunker fuel permeating the air. One of us would capture a bird in his or
her net; the other would gently untangle it and place it in a cardboard
transport box, trying to avoid inflicting yet more stress. Holding these
small victims in my purple-gloved hands, I was awed at their beauty and
dignity, and sick about what we humans had done.”
Two years ater the
Cosco Busan
debacle, the
Dubai Star
spilled hun-
dreds of gallons of bunker fuel while refilling one of its tanks. Although
the ship was carrying an absorbent boom, the crew did not notice the spill
until a one-mile-long sheen was headed for beaches in the East Bay. The
spill prompted environmentalists to call for mandatory placement of
booms around vessels before fueling. This mandate is now enforced in the
Puget Sound and Alaska's Prince William Sound, where oil from the 1989
Exxon Valdez
disaster is still trapped in the beach sands 20 years later.
In the wake of these spills, California has taken several steps to im-
prove response. In 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed seven
bills that together require faster notification of local emergency respond-
ers during the next spill, more funding to train bar pilots and new volun-
