A bike and beach day

Though my heart is with Refugio Beach in California, which is currently undergoing an oil spill and clean-up efforts, I found myself captivated by another marvelous beach in this weekend. A Saturday of brilliant sunshine and beautiful warm weather after a week of rain prompted an unplanned bike trip to Falkensteinerstrand, 16km of winding beautiful bike paths to the north of Kiel. A few wrong turns necessitated some pidgin German direction-asking, which ended up being amazingly helpful (and coherent!) despite substantial limitations on my part.

A beautiful way to celebrate a day of sunshine in the north.

Coal Oil Point Reserve: steeped in oil

The current oil spill along the Santa Barbara coastline is impacting Coal Oil Point Reserve, a beautiful native plant and wildlife reserve where I worked during my last year in California. I led groups as a tour guide and wrote about it over at Hawkmoth Mag. Coal Oil Point Reserve are sharing updates about the oil impact and clean-up on their Facebook page, where you can follow along.

Meanwhile, take a moment to appreciate this beautiful misted coastline from the reserve (last summer, pre-spill):



Oh, but see that oil platform out there? It's like a lurking dark rain cloud on a bright horizon. That's where the oil came from in this current spill, although the operators of the platform (Venoco, Inc.) are different from the ones who own the pipeline that ruptured (Plains All American Pipeline). The oil is sent from the platform to the mainland via pipes operated by Venoco, Inc. (these guys seem to have a fairly good track record); and once onshore, it enters Plains pipelines. These are the bad guys. Plains All American Pipeline. The guys who don't give a crap about safety and environmental regulation, and who can't be bothered to set up the basic precautions to avoid a spill. It was of course their pipeline that ruptured, and which is painting the coastline black with oil and tar.

As a note, the platform is called Platform Holly, and I would always introduce it in a joking way in my tours. Platform Holly, Tour Guide Holly. Ha ha.

Oil on the Californian Coastline and in my heart

Last week, an oil pipeline on the California coast ruptured and poured 105,000 gallons of crude oil onto the coast and into the ocean near Santa Barbara. It's not known for how long oil was pouring out of the pipe, but what is know is that the oil company did not have an automatic shut-down valve on the pipes, and it did not have county oversight which would have required such a valve.

What Plains All American Pipeline did have was an over-inflated sense of confidence, despite previous mechanical problems on the pipe on either side of the rupture point. And this is not the only instance of disregard for safety regulations they have shown: Plans All American Pipeline has a terrible history of oil spills, with 175 federal safety and maintenance violations since 2006. This is not a company that should be in charge of oil extraction anywhere on this valuable planet.

Because this is what the real tragedy of the spill is: the environmental cost. Once oil has been released into the ecosystem, it can never be fully removed. The chief executive of Plains All American Pipeline has vowed that they will help clean up until "everything has been restored to normal" - but that's just not possible. "Normal" is not something that happens again after an oil spill. The impacts of oil spills last for years, if not decades.

Why such long-lasting impacts? In high concentrations, it can poison animals through ingestion, or drown them by getting caught in feathers and fur. This usually happens during the early stages of an oil spill. But as the oil continues to spread out from the initial spill site, and disintegrate into smaller and smaller particles that are invisible to the naked eye, it continues to have a profound effect. This "invisible" oil can seep into sand, reefs, and beaches, smothering small organisms that form the foundation of ecosystem food webs. And it impacts organisms higher in the trophic web, as well: even in small amounts, oil can impair the development of fish eggs and embryos.

These impacts on organisms cause a long-term bottom-up shift in the ecological landscape. Imagine: out of 100k gallons of oil poured into the ocean, how much of that has already begun to seep into the sands of the Santa Barbara coastline? How much has already been carried off by tides and wave motion, and is no longer recoverable? Effects of this spill will be seen for years to come. What Plains All American Pipeline (and many companies before it) has done is literally irreversible.

The sad thing is: making Plains All American Pipeline pay out for this probably won't make much of a difference to their future behavior. After all, they've paid out for 175 other violations and spills over the last 9 years and it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference to their attitude toward environmental and social responsibility, so why should we think they'll learn another lesson this time? What we need to do is change how we talk about regulation and enforcement of oil companies and their pipelines: we have to fight these spills long before they even happen. Better yet, maybe one day soon we'll finally talk about scaling back these activities in favor of greener options (but that's a whole other conversation). Meanwhile, we need to make sure that irresponsible entities like this one can't slip through the cracks.

California, my heart is with you even if I can't be there in body.