California's Oil Leak Is Part of a Larger Disaster in the Making
I’d imagine it was weird for them, and alarming, to wake up that morning to the smell of petroleum wafting inland from the Pacific Ocean. Alarming for the usual reasons — nobody gets happy when they smell flammable gas inside their home — but also weird in a way that felt unique to Newport Beach. The seaside getaway town in Orange County, 45 miles south of Los Angeles, was recently named the wealthiest city in Southern California (the late NBA star Kobe Bryant owned a palatial home here) and one of the wealthiest in America. Bad things and bad smells from ecological disasters happen to plenty of people, but they’re not supposed to happen to people who live here.
Also weird, though, and almost as alarming, were the news descriptions of how local experts reacted to the pipeline rupture that belched up anywhere from 25,000 to 132,000 gallons of oil off the coast on October 1. Newport Beach’s harbormaster, Paul Blank, was “relieved the spill had been relatively contained,” according to the New York Times. “I live in fear of something like this happening.” Michael Ziccardi, director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, a consortium of trained care providers affiliated with UC Davis, told the Los Angeles Times that the number of oiled-coated birds they’d had to rescue as of Tuesday was “surprisingly low” — only one brown pelican had to be euthanized.
It’s normal, of course, to be glad a bad thing wasn’t worse, and so far, the death toll of this particular spill is low enough to keep it off the list of historically large mass marine die-offs, like those after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. But reading about what Ziccardi and his team are doing — dipping seabirds in tubs of detergent and lamenting how many sand crabs and their eggs are probably turning into poisoned snacks for the other local wildlife — you can’t help but feel we’ve warped our sense of “bad” to accommodate how bad things constantly are.
We don’t know all the details yet about last Friday’s spill, but we do know it’s not even the worst spill to affect this particular stretch of the Southern California coast since many of us have been alive. In 1990, a tanker dumped more than three times as much oil — 416,000 gallons — into the ocean off the coast of Huntington Beach, the city immediately north of Newport Beach. Longtime residents who remember 1990 have been compelled to adjust their frustration accordingly: You think this is bad? Try watching 3,400 dying birds wash onto the sand.
Read more: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/10/californias-oil-leak-is-part-of-a-larger-disaster.html
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