This piece was written by Oceans and Communities Advisory Board member Koa Pickering in response to the recent fuel spill in San Francisco Bay.
I wake to the ocean. It is my daily ritual. Before the sun climbs over the eastern hills, in the half light of morning, I am at the water’s edge watching the roll and crash of the waves, getting a sense of the ocean’s mood before I dip my surfboard into the cold water.
But on Thursday, November 8, I had a “crude” awakening – one that will change my personal behavior and hopefully serve as a wake up call that will end how we as a society abuse the ocean.
I arrived at my local surf break in Marin just as the first light was breaking. But when I opened my car window to check the surf, I immediately knew something was wrong: a thick waft of oil laden air flooded my nostrils. I was confused for a moment - both because of the pervasive oil odor as well how completely it saturated the air – the source of the odor a momentary mystery.
It was then in the faint light of dawn, that I noticed traffic barriers placed along edge of the parking lot, with signs announcing the oil spill and beach closure. My heart sank as I immediately realized the magnitude of what had, and was occurring.
While I had heard about the tanker hitting the Bay Bridge the previous night, I, like so many others, was unaware that 58,000 gallons of bunker oil had been spilling into the San Francisco Bay all night from the Cosco Busan.
How does one react when a place that one knows so intimately has suddenly been struck with disaster?
For me, it was the realization that the spill will have impacts far beyond interrupting surfers from catching a good swell. A more sobering realization was the likely magnitude of the ecological impacts from such a mishap. If the air was saturated with the oil’s odor, what was going on in the water to birds and marine mammals that struggle blackened along our beaches, to the countless creatures that live along our coast that we do not see, such as the abalone and the kelp forests?
As I drove to work that morning my heart sank as I suspected that the oil would taint our local waters and beaches far into the future - well beyond the initial clean up effort. As I listened to news reports through the day, learning of beach closures, and oil plumes migrating out the Golden Gate and up the coast (as far as 40-miles north), it became painfully clear how fragile our bay and coastline are.
I also realized how much I took for granted the simple pleasure of visiting the beach to enjoy a daily surf session.
Not being able to go in the contaminated water that morning drove home the reality of how much we as a society need to cherish, care for, and protect our marine environment. All it took was a moment’s mishap with one of the countless oil tankers that enter the bay every month. The possibility of a much more significant disaster is sobering.
Time will tell the continuing story of this disaster…who is to blame, which agency acted too slow, what should have been done. The real tragedy is the fact that this spill has already impacted our local marine environment in horrendous ways.
The Pacific not only provides us with food, play, and the dramatic natural beauty that makes our coast so unique, but the like all the oceans, it is a vast wilderness that has survived our continued abuses: from the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch – the mass of plastic waste twice the size of Texas that is floating in between the West Coast and Hawaii - to coral bleaching, and depleted fisheries.
How much more can we ask our oceans to take? Despite the track record (albeit a poor one) we have shown in our efforts at stewardship, new plans to plunder and pollute the ocean arise every day – from deep sea mining to dumping iron ore and even urea in the ocean. The oceans continue to give what they can, and we take, and we take, and we take. It is time to wake up to the “crude” smell in the air of our own ignorance, greed and complacency. It is time to wake up and respect our oceans.
Koa Pickering, a Marin County resident, surfs almost daily along the Northern California coast, and is on the Advisory Board of Oceans and Communities, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending the oceans.
To add your voice to the growing call to ban bunker fuel in California, please sign our petition.
