Posted on 11/12/2007 6:19:25 PM PST by TornadoAlley3
11/12/2007 - Several remain closed, as crews in hazmat suits work to clean up the shoreline. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi grilled the U.S. Coast Guard Monday during a tour of her district's environmental disaster caused by last week's 58,000 gallon oil spill in the San Francisco Bay.
It's clear a Congressional investigation is coming over the notification: why it took 8 hours to determine it was much more than the 140-gallon spill, they first reported. And why it took another four hours after that to notify the public. "The fact that this could happen raises serious questions about what the system is," says Pelosi.
The Coast Guard is standing by its response to the spill, but apologized for the delay in notification. Adm. Craig Bone, U.S. Coast Guard, says "Again, I don't have any excuses for that. I think I said that on Day 2 of this incident. We will make corrective action."
At the state level, Democrats, environmentalists and watchdog groups point the finger at Governor Schwarzenegger for California being poorly prepared to deal with oil spills.
They say the Governor hasn't made enough appointments to regional water boards so they can make decisions. He also hasn't spent the special 5-cent-per-gallon tax on oil companies to staff and buy equipment for Fish & Game's Office of Oil Spill Prevention.
State Senator Don Perata, D-Oakland, says "It's their job to make sure these things are minimized and the response maximized."
Meanwhile, the heartache continues for rescuers trying to save as many oil-covered birds as possible. So far they've collected more than 900 birds along the shoreline. Close to 400 were already dead.
The big government liberals sure do like blaming the government for everything these days, don’t they?
Saw Pelosi on camera today blaming the US Coast Guard....
Amazing how the Democrats want to trust our health care to the government; then turn around and blame anything and everything on government agencies not doing their jobs....
They might be able to accomplish more if they weren’t spending all that time and money on a bunch of birds.
Just catch them, put them humanely to sleep, and be done with it.
She screamed for a government investigation (that is number 1051 so far this year) to investigate why G. Bush caused or didn’t stop this travesty. Can anyone point to a documented RESULT of one of her frikkin studies?
Hundreds of $million$ in costs and not one dime in results!
Atta girl, bitch!
Oh, good grief. Do they wear hazmat suits to gas up their bloody cars, too?! Every asphalt parking lot in San Francisco is comprised of 100% of the oil just like they are cleaning up on the beaches.
Do they wear full body hazmat suits to park their cars in San Francisco, now?!
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/12/california.oil.spill/?iref=mpstoryview
Coast Guard: Oil spill probably due to ‘human error’
Although Allen conceded some confusion in the Coast Guard’s communication, he said it did not reflect their response.
“Response was set into play within an hour of the event itself,” Allen said Monday. Regarding the initial low estimate of 140 gallons of lost oil, Allen said heavy fog and damage to the ship’s tanks hindered initial aerial and on-ground evaluations of how much oil had leaked from the ship.
Texas and Louisiana didn’t have any oil spills from hundreds of off-shore wells during hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Similar pipelines could protect the beaches on the West Coast from being at the mercy of Chinese tankers bringing hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil to CA in the fog, but no-o-o-o. We couldn’t have that.
The ship was a container ship not an oil tanker. The fuel tank was breached, hence the spill.
[Cant we just import a bunch of Polar Bears from the Arctic? Drop them in the bay and let them swim around. They soak up oil like nobodys business.]
Those cute little sea otters work good for that too...
Pelosi is just being consistent. The spill is not the fault of those who spilled, it is George Bush’s Coast Guard at fault.
Just like terror attacks are not the fault of those who do the attacks, but the fault of....of....George Bush!
Oh.
Wait.
We did spend tens of billions of dollars ....
A guy who called in to Levin’s radio show claimed it was a Chinese container ship and that the California press was burying that lead story. He was extremely mad and said the Chinese were not happy enough trying to poison our kids with lead painted toys, now they were polluting our water. He seemed very upset that Pelosi was cracking down on the Coast Guard guys but ignoring the crappy Chinese shipping company that was the real culprit.
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