California disasters
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
Still making big news nationwide is the oil spill in the San Francisco Bay. I’m up in San Francisco right now, and so far mayor Gavin Newsom, newly re-elected, has put in an appearance, along with governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to assess the damage. While they haven’t really done anything and have absolutely nothing to say, the locals and park rangers around the Crissy Field area say that the beaches may be closed for years due to oil washing up on the beaches. While San Francisco doesn’t have any beaches that I consider worthwhile (meaning you can’t swim at any of them due to freezing water, unusually strong tides, and riptides), it is really nice to climb down to Baker Beach (nude or clothed, there’s a bit of both there) and just sit on the sheltered beach and enjoy the fabulous view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Now we can’t even do that, since the sands are covered in oil and poor dead birds keep washing up. Most locals who want to volunteer can’t because they don’t have clean suits to wear, because not wearing them means severe sickness from the oil. Criticisms are running rampant here, with the ship’s crew being blamed because they should have been too experienced and too familiar with the bay to collide with the Bay Bridge, and the Coast Guard for being slow to respond and only reporting 1/10th of the oil spilled, thereby causing too much of a delay picking up the oil until it was too finely dissipated in the water to be able to collect. The entire bay is affected and will be for countless years, everything from protected wildlife to the shipping industry via Oakland to local fisherman.
The other big California disaster is of course the fires. Though long extinguished now, people are still looking for someone to point their fingers at. While President Bush and the rest of the government seemed to learn their lesson big-time after Hurricane Katrina and he made a speedy appearance on the scene in San Diego, FEMA had their butt handed to them again as it was revealed that they had staged a press conference in a desperate attempt to make themselves look more capable of handling large-scale emergencies. You know, what they were supposed to be doing, as opposed to staging press conferences. Despite their shaky past, though, Southern Californians are giving FEMA good grades, saying that they have responded quickly to claims and that over 1,000 fire victims have been given aid already. Maybe this, and not self congratulations, will be what turns FEMA’s image around.
