Bay Area Oil Spill: A worry for us, too
It could have happened here. The oil spill in San Francisco Bay has revived the longstanding worries about an environmental disaster in Washington's inland waters.
Last week's spill was so preventable as to verge toward the absurd. The spill when a pilot ran a container ship into a Bay Bridge tower created a state of emergency, killed or injured hundreds of birds and contaminated beaches.
As environmentalists here point out, the apparently key role of human error in the San Francisco spill bears resemblances to what Washington has experienced repeatedly over the years. And the slow recognition of the harm's extent is also hauntingly familiar, with the 2004 Dalco Passage spill in Puget Sound as a recent reminder.
We think officials learned lessons from the difficulties here, but prevention and preparedness efforts need to be renewed constantly and improved. Otherwise, complacency and turnover among key personnel will create slippage.
The advocacy group People for Puget Sound calls the San Francisco spill and the confused initial response as "Captain Hazelwood meets Homer Simpson. Human error compounded by human error equals eco disaster."
Neither the state nor the federal government has committed to financing the key prevention strategy of placing a permanent rescue tug at Neah Bay year around. That would be one way to provide an extra margin of error against the kinds of disasters that threaten any time humans and machinery must cope with the forces of nature.
This article is republished courtesy of the Seattle P-I:
Bay Area Oil Spill: A worry for us, too
