Schrag: Damage from Toxic Oil Spill Small Potatoes Next to Day-In, Day-Out Air Pollution from California's Major Ports

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Consider When Negotiating Senate Bill 974 (Lowenthal)

By Peter Schrag

Had the container ship Cosco Busan run into a bridge pier and spilled 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel in Savannah, Tacoma or even Long Beach it would have been just as deplorable. That it happened in San Francisco, the mother church of environmentalism, made it blasphemy.

So it wasn't surprising that California's politicians, from the governor down, outdid themselves demanding or launching investigations to determine who deserved the rap for the fouled beaches and the dead birds. Some quickly castigated the Coast Guard and other emergency agencies, many long underfunded, for their slow response. What if a terrorist ... ?

Next to the day-in, day-out air pollution generated by the ships, trucks and diesel railroad engines engaged in containerized transport at California's major ports, the damage from the accident at the Bay Bridge, however toxic, was small potatoes.

Still, the incident – admiralty lawyers call it an allision, meaning the ship hit a fixed object, not another ship – ought to be a loud reminder of the larger price in illness, environmental degradation and congestion that we pay for the ports.

It should also be a reminder that it's long past time for California to start recapturing some of those costs from the shippers and the people east of us whose consumption of cheap Chinese goods we effectively subsidize, and use the revenue to mitigate the pollution and its effects.

The biggest impact of that dirty air is on poor people, children especially, living near the ports and nearby railyards, where the incidence of asthma and other respiratory diseases is through the roof.

If you go by old sea lore, the Cosco Busan (originally the Hanjin Cairo) was cursed from the moment she was renamed. Change the name and you have a hard-luck ship. In the six years since she was built in Korea, she had sailed under two flags, had two owners and was now nominally owned by one company, registered to another, operated by a third and chartered by a fourth.