Sort of wrecks the city a bit, huh?
"Oil Spill Fouls Shores in San Francisco Area" by FELICITY BARRINGER
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 8 — A South Korean container ship hit one of the stanchions of the Bay Bridge in a dense fog on Wednesday, spilling 58,000 gallons of bunker oil.
Strong tides have since swept the slick through the mouth of San Francisco Bay, fouling beaches up to 20 miles north of the city and girdling Alcatraz Island with a belt of goo.
Bet you Clint wouldn't have been able to swim that!
I'm angry because I've toured Alcatraz!!!
While every change of tide sent the oil to a different shore, the largest concentrations were “one-and-a-half to two miles offshore, west of the Golden Gate bridge,” said Lt. Rob Roberts of the California Department of Fish and Game. Several beaches were closed by the spill.
Lieutenant Roberts said that of the 26 oil-covered shorebirds that had been found, six were dead.
The spill, though just one two-hundredth the size of the Exxon Valdez spill into Prince William Sound in Alaska, still hit a nerve in a region whose self-image and international reputation is closely tied to its bridges, cold blue waters, beaches and rocky bluffs — many of them now touched by the oil.
The Coast Guard and the California Department of Fish and Game extended yellow booms to keep the bunker fuel, one of the crudest and least-distilled petroleum products, from various shorelines, including the entrances to wildlife-rich estuaries north of San Francisco.
Wil Bruhns, a division chief with the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, said that the outward bound ebb tide carried the slick “up the coast, where we’re getting reports of oil sheens and bad smell and oiled birds.”
The ship, the Cosco Busan, owned by the Hanjin Shipping company of South Korea, struck a pier on the bridge’s western side. The glancing blow sheared off most of the protective fender of woodlike plastic, which was nearly 3 feet thick and 10 feet wide, said Bart Ney, a spokesman for the state transportation department.
Jessica Castelli, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit environmental group Save the Bay, said worried residents had flooded her group with offers to clean injured birds and oiled beaches.
Mr. Bruhns said that while he could not prejudge the investigation being conducted by the Coast Guard, earlier accidents had led to prosecutions:
“Lots of ships go around the bay, and it’s really rare the bridges get hit, even in fog. There is radar.”
I'm surprised this shit doesn't happen more often!
