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[Koomaster]

Whoa, whoa whoa?! I originally heard the original 140 gallons figure, and now it's 58,000 gallons?! Holy Crap?! How are you off base by that much?! @_______@

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Whoa, whoa whoa?! I originally heard the original 140 gallons figure, and now it's 58,000 gallons?! Holy Crap?! How are you off base by that much?! @_______@

I'm guessing this is why the major news outlets aren't carrying the story, they're still thinking the original 140 gallon figure?

 

[methodman]

I'm guessing this is why the major news outlets aren't carrying the story, they're still thinking the original 140 gallon figure?

Bay Area news is fucking stupid. How have I not heard of this until I came on GAF of all places

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Bay Area news is fucking stupid. How have I not heard of this until I came on GAF of all places

Well, it was all over news radio last night and this morning after the true spill total was mentioned (at least on 740 and 810), and SFGate seems to be the place to go for coverage.

Dunno about news on the local TV stations.

 

[Revengeance]

I posted this in the TV Show thread like a dumbass

So did the oil make the ducks eyes red?

I'm pretty sure that's a cormorant, not a duck, and their eyes can be red to begin with.

 

[davepoobond]

FFS

 

[Cauliflower of Love]

Bay Area news is fucking stupid. How have I not heard of this until I came on GAF of all places

Illuminati are keeping it on the DL.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

This particular image makes me wonder how the Coast Guard can believe only a bit over 100 gallons were leaked when the damage is nearly bigger than your freaking boat?!

 

[BudokaiMR2]

But yeah, damn california seems to be constantly fucked.

Now there just needs to be a tree on fire to fall into the oil spill somehow and turn the whole bay into a sea of fire.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

But yeah, damn california seems to be constantly fucked.

Now there just needs to be a tree on fire to fall into the oil spill somehow and turn the whole bay into a sea of fire.

 

[Suburban Cowboy]

wouldnt lighting the bay on fire clean up the oil faster?

 

[XiaNaphryz]

wouldnt lighting the bay on fire clean up the oil faster?

I'm sure the fumes would be just as bad from that.

It looks like UC Davis will be heading a effort for cleaning affected birds, and will update the link below with notices if they need public volunteers for anyone in the area interested in helping out.

http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/owcn/

UC Davis wildlife experts are leading the rescue of oiled birds in San Francisco today after a container ship spilled nearly 60,000 gallons of heavy bunker fuel oil into the bay.

Three veterinarians and a veterinary technician arrived at Fort Mason Wednesday to organize the rescue effort and begin treating injured birds.

At 1 p.m. today, there were 21 seabirds being treated, all of them surf scoters, according to UC Davis veterinarian Michael Ziccardi, director of the California Oiled Wildlife Care Network.

Jonna Mazet, a UC Davis veterinarian and international authority on the rescue and treatment of oiled wildlife, has said in the past that for every oiled seabird that is found washed ashore, an estimated 10 to 100 birds died at sea.

The UC Davis rescue team is working in a custom-built recovery and rehabilitation trailer. There, they assess the health status of oiled birds that are being brought in from beaches and the bay waters.

Then the birds are put in boxes and driven to the San Francisco Bay Oiled Wildlife Care and Education Center in Cordelia (just outside Fairfield), where they will receive the world's most advanced veterinary care for oiled wildlife.

At the center, the first order of business is not to remove oil from the birds. Instead, it is to warm the birds and nourish them. Once stabilized, they will be better able to withstand the stresses of being washed.

The Cordelia center is a 12,000-square-foot, $2.7 million facility capable of caring for up to 1,000 sick birds. It is the major Northern California rescue center in the statewide Oiled Wildlife Care Network, which comprises nine rescue facilities and 25 organizations prepared to care for oiled wildlife on short notice.

At each California rescue center, UC Davis wildlife veterinarians work in partnership with local, trained wildlife rehabilitators. At the Cordelia center, those rehabilitators are staff members of the International Bird Rescue Research Center.

At this time, a standing corps of trained volunteers is being called up to staff the rescue center. If more volunteers are needed, a notice will be posted online at http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/owcn/.

The Oiled Wildlife Care Network is managed statewide by the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, a unit of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

The network is funded by the Office of Spill Prevention and Response of the California Department of Fish and Game. The Fish and Game monies come from interest on the $50 million California Oil Spill Response Trust Fund, built from assessments on the oil industry.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

More images from the cleanup effort as workers bag as much of the oil that washes ashore as possible. This is gonna take at least several weeks I'd think.

 

[Jamesfrom818]

:lol

GHOST RIDE THE SHIP! GHOST RIDE THE SHIP!

:lol

 

[Tarazet]

What is it with these huge failures of transit near the Bay Area? Earlier this year, there was a tanker truck accident that cut off part of the busiest work commute and forced EVERYBODY onto public transportation.

That particular fire closed off the connector from westbound 80 to southbound 880 and eastbound 80 to eastbound 580. Fortunately, it was still possible to use the working connectors, together with Highway 980, to duplicate the affected routes. So traffic was not as badly affected as people thought it would be. Look at a Google map of Oakland to see what I mean.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

That particular fire closed off the connector from westbound 80 to southbound 880 and eastbound 80 to eastbound 580. Fortunately, it was still possible to use the working connectors, together with Highway 980, to duplicate the affected routes. So traffic was not as badly affected as people thought it would be. Look at a Google map of Oakland to see what I mean.

There was also a significant bump in mass transit riders as well, I believe BART set some records during that time.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Some follow-up news:


Bar pilot on errant ship had several mishaps in past

Capt. John Cota, the veteran master mariner who was piloting the container ship Cosco Busan when it hit the Bay Bridge on Wednesday, has been involved in a number of ship-handling incidents and was reprimanded last year for an error in judgment when he ran a ship aground, state regulatory documents show.

Cota, 59, has been a bar pilot, guiding ships in and out of San Francisco Bay and its tributaries, for more than 25 years. Many mariners consider him an excellent ship handler.

But he has had four "incidents" involving an investigation by the Board of Pilot Commissioners in the past 14 years and has been "counseled" by pilot commission executives on several other occasions, documents show.

Capt. Patrick Moloney, executive director of the Pilot Commission for the Bays of San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun, described Cota as a "very good pilot," but said his record of ship-handling incidents "is in the upper half for frequency."

...

The cause of the accident is a mystery - it is unclear whether the ship hit the bridge tower base because of some mechanical failure of the ship's equipment, an error by the pilot, or some other reason.

Whatever the reason, the accident was highly unusual. It was the first time a ship has hit a Bay Bridge support since the span was built more than 70 years ago.

Cota's role in the accident is under investigation because he was the officer giving orders to navigate the ship when it hit the bridge.

...

Cota has been before the Pilot Commission for the Bays of San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun, a state regulatory agency, several times in his career.

In his most recent incident, he was reprimanded in July 2006 after an investigation showed that he had allowed the bulk freighter Pioneer to move out of the channel and run aground when it was approaching a dock at Antioch in February 2006.

According to records of the Pilot Commission, "Capt. Cota had not realized that the vessel was going off track and did nothing to prevent it."

He also received a "letter of concern" for an incident involving a small Navy aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay in 2003.

Cota was involved in four other incidents dating to 1993. Before that, Moloney said, Cota was "counseled" by commission executives a number of times.

Cota works in a system that is both tightly regulated - all pilots, for example, must go through exhaustive licensing and training procedures - and extremely complex, especially when it involves foreign ships.

Coast Guard says it took too long to announce size of oil spill

As oil contaminated more beaches and birds throughout the Bay Area, Coast Guard officials today admitted they took too long to notify the public about the skyrocketing size of the ship-fuel spill but defended their response to the mess.

"That is unacceptable," Coast Guard Admiral Craig Bone replied when asked about the five hours - from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Wednesday - that it took for his agency to announce the huge magnitude of the spill.

Bone spoke with the news reporters today at Fort Mason before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger arrvived to view the catastrophe. Officials from the city of San Francisco to Congress have lambasted the Coast Guard for its response and promised legal action or public hearings on the matter.

"We needed to be better at communicating," Bone said.

But he said the response to the crisis was appropriate and that there was nothing more that should have been done to contain bunker fuel once it began to pour from the damaged hull of the Cosco Busan container ship on Wednesday.

The ship rammed a tower footing of the Bay Bridge Wednesday at about 8:30 a.m. and within an hour six emergency vessels from the Coast Guard and a private company contracted by the ship's owner had converged on the site.

By then, officials said, 58,000 gallons of heavy, gunky fuel had spewed through a long gash in the ship's side and into the bay waters - although officials said at the time that only 140 gallons had spilled.

Emergency crews began laying out containment booms in the water, but Bone said the heavy fog at the time hampered their ability to see where the oil was spreading. The heavy fog may have also contributed to the accident itself, officials said, as the ship was negotiating its way under the bridge, even though it uses sophisticated electronic monitoring equipment to guide its way.

The Coast Guard and Marine Spill Recovery Corp., the private company, also did not have the benefit of aerial flyovers to help them on the first day, Bone said. On Thursday, the Coast Guard lofted two helicopters to assess the damage - but on Wednesday, there was too much fog to send the copters, he said.

Bone, whose agency is investigating the spill along with the state Department of Fish and Game said there will be a rigorous hunt for wrongdoing on the part of his agency or anyone else involved in the incident.

"Responsible parties will be held accountable," he said.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

More bad news, oil spill may affect crab season. I'm guessing we'll see seafood prices start getting affected by this soon.

After a summer of poor fishing, the Golden Gate's fishing fleets now are facing a new crisis, less than a week before the commercial crabbing season is set to begin.

Bunker fuel from the Cosco Busan spill not only has drifted right over many of the prime fishing spots in the main bay but also into the Pacific, where it is impacting prime salmon and crabbing water before it washes ashore along the Marin coastline.

Commercial boats were scheduled to set their crab pots this coming Wednesday for Thursday's opener that traditionally supplies Dungeness for the holiday demand. Because of the fuel spill, that opener might be in question.

"We're trying to decide what to do," said Larry Collins, president of the Crab Boat Owners Association in San Francisco.

Commercial crabbers from San Francisco, Half Moon Bay and Bodega Bay are meeting at the association's hall at Fisherman's Wharf at 2 p.m. Saturday to vote on whether to postpone the season opener until after Dec. 1.

"There's a good chance we would postpone the season if the spill extends over the crab grounds," Collins said. "I'm just one fisherman, but I think we should postpone it. If the crab come up through the fuel, they could be contaminated."

Even if the boats drop pots, there's still the significant matter of getting the crab to the wholesalers in San Francisco.

"We need to bring them into the bay to unload," Collins said. "If that means circulating (fuel-contaminated) water through our holding tanks, we couldn't even offload in the city."

Collins is just as worried about the spill's long-term effect on the bay, which is a nursery for young Dungeness crab.

"Right now, the bay is loaded with baby Dungeness. As that fuel moves down the water column, it could devastate crab numbers for years to come."

Many of the local sportfishing charter boats already are feeling an economic impact from the spill.

Jay Yokomizo, who runs the party boat New Huck Finn out of Emeryville, has seen his business evaporate following news of Wednesday's spill.

"No one is going to want to fish in an oil-spill zone. And I don't blame them. I hate to say it, but that's the reality of it. There is a lot of bunker fuel on the water, right over some of the places we fish."

The most dramatic impact to fisheries, so far, has taken place in the main bay, where a heavy coating of fuel remains around Angel Island and over the Berkeley Flats, which are considered some of the most productive halibut and striped bass haunts in the bay. The areas are host to numerous other game fish species, as well.

 

[Escape Goat]

More bad news, oil spill may affect crab season. I'm guessing we'll see seafood prices start getting affected by this soon.

i dont know how much of crab comes from the bay area but i cant imagine this affecting prices.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

i dont know how much of crab comes from the bay area but i cant imagine this affecting prices.

Most of the crabbing occurs off-shore up and down in the Pacific, but the Bay Area supplies a pretty large population with seafood throughout California. I'm sure it will affect local prices, but if there's limited local crabs available in the area and California starts taking more from farther north I'm sure that will also affect prices on a larger scale, at least for Dungeness.

 

[Companion Cube]

Also, supposedly Ocean Beach is contaminated now, surfers are reporting their wetsuits are dissolving in the fuel oil.

...