Oil Spills NO Different to Earthquakes
They Both Spell Disaster, Occur Because of Faults and Happen Regularly in San Francisco Bay
Earthquakes occur in SFB because of geological faults: San Gregorio fault, San Andreas fault, Mt Diablo fault… and Hayward fault. Oil spills occur there as a result of oil companies faults: Arco’s fault, BP’s fault, Chevron’s fault, ConocoPhillips’s fault, Exxon’s fault… and Shell’s fault!
You’d forgiven for thinking there must be an oil spill and an earthquake in the SFBA each day! Because you’d almost be right.
The oil slick from the Dubai Star, an oil tanker located at Anchorage 9 south of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Photo: KGO-TV/ABC7 via Mercury News. Image may be subject to copyright.
The latest spill, a blackish filthy brown slick of bunker fuel, covered a 250-meter by 4-km stretch of San Francisco Bay on Friday, caused by a “refueling mishap” between an oil tanker, Dubai Star, and a service barge alongside, the U.S. Coast Guard reported.
The slick has not reached land and is in a narrow band because there is little wind and much of it may burn off amid warm weather, giving clean-up crews the upper hand in containing it, Coast Guard Captain Paul Gugg told reporters at a press conference.
“The weather is very cooperative. We’re all over it.” Gugg said.
Gugg said the scope of the contamination does not compare to the massive spill in 2007 of fuel oil from another tanker in the San Francisco Bay that spread across its shores and killed thousand of birds.
However, Gugg didn’t say how much bunker fuel had spilled into the bay.
The spill comes eight days before the two-year anniversary of the vessel Cosco Busan striking the Bay Bridge in dense fog, ripping open its hull and spilling more than 53,000 gallons of fuel oil that fouled much of the shoreline along the well-known California waterway.
The Busan spill killed more than 2,500 birds and deposited oil on 200 miles of coastline, Pacific Environment was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile,
The unscrupulous oil giant BP has been fined $87 million for failing to remove safety hazards at its massive Texas City refinery, the 3rd largest in the US, where an explosion in 2005 killed 15 workers and injured 180 others. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited 270 violations at the oil refinery, officials said.
In 2005, BP was fined $21.3 million and ordered to repair hazards at their refinery, but it didn’t
“Lawyers acting for victims of the disaster suggested that the renewed action could put BP in breach of a plea agreement two years ago in which it pleaded guilty to a single felony and paid $373m to settle a string of criminal charges.” UK’s Guardian reported.
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