It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, October 07, 2021
COWABUNGA DUDE
Surfers sidelined as California races to clean up oil spill
Issued on: 07/10/2021 -
The normally thronged Huntington Beach is all but empty after an oil spill closed a long section of coast
Patrick T. FALLON AFP
Huntington Beach (United States) (AFP)
Beaches normally thronged with the bronzed torsos of surfers are deserted as California races to clean up a huge oil spill.
Up to 131,000 gallons of crude could have leaked into the Pacific Ocean on the west coast of the United States when a pipeline ruptured at the weekend.
Authorities are investigating whether a ship's anchor could have ripped open the pipe, dragging it more than 100 feet (30 meters) along the seafloor.
A 15-mile (24-kilometer) stretch of coast has been closed to the public -- including some prime surfing spots that are usually packed with boarders.
"It's weird to see no surfing out there for miles. It's very strange," said Shawna Sakal, manager of a surf store just yards from Huntington Beach pier.
"There's always people surfing, they're doing it year-round. The ocean is full of surfers, especially on the north and south side of the pier."
Huntington Beach revolves around surfing. Equipment rental and sales stores jostle for space with surf schools.
Cargo ships are anchored off the coast waiting for a berth at Los Angeles or Long Beach ports
Frederic J. BROWN AFP
But almost all of them are now shuttered.
For the tight-knit community of surfers, that's tough.
"We have a bunch of friends that just surf, so sometimes we don't even text each other," said 18-year-old Jake McNerney. "We'll just see each other out there." - Logjam -
More than 300 personnel are involved in the emergency response to the spill, which has been traced to a pipeline near Long Beach.
Clean up crews outnumber surfers at Huntington Beach
Patrick T. FALLON AFP
Dozens of container ships are anchored off the harbor there -- one of the world's busiest container ports -- waiting for a berth in a pandemic-sparked shipping logjam.
The Los Angeles Times cited a federal investigator as saying a misplaced anchor from one of these ships was the most likely cause of the pipeline's rupture.
Officials said almost 5,000 gallons of crude have been recovered so far, and more than a dozen birds covered in oil have been rescued.
Clean-up crews in protective gear could be seen on Newport Beach, further down the coastline, with weather patterns pushing oil south. - School -
Powder blue skies and warm sunshine offered perfect beach weather on Wednesday, but stores and restaurants that rely on visitors were empty.
Oil platforms dot the coastline of California
Frederic J. BROWN AFP
"Probably 50 percent of our business we probably lost so far," said Sakal, whose father has been selling the surfboards he makes in their family-run store for five decades. October is prime surfing time.
"It's the best for surfers, and it's best for people that live here. The weather's really nice during this time," said Sakal.
"It gets hot in the inland areas, so they all come to the beach on the weekends, but they can't come to the beach now because of the oil spill."
The disaster has also put a hole in the curriculum of one local school, where surf skills count as a credit towards graduation.
"We had just begun our competitive season the week before the spill," says Lisa Battig of Fountain Valley School, located just minutes from the beach.
"All five teams also operate as classes and students receive PE (physical education) credit.
The waters of Southern California are teeming with wildlife, including birds, fish, whales and dolphins
Frederic J. BROWN AFP
"We will be staying out of our local waters until we receive the all clear from the agencies."
In the meantime, students will be practicing on land, she says, and traveling out of the area to surf at the weekend.
But they will be doing their part to help speed along the clean-up.
"When and if it is safe and reasonable, the students will also get involved with clean-up," she said.
Many of the same tools and technologies have been deployed to deal with these environmental catastrophes over the past 20 years, but now, two teams of scientists say their reusable sponges can sop up oil at the surface and underwater — in some cases holding more than 30 times their weight — without doing additional harm to the marine environment.
It's the kind of innovation they say could make oil spill cleanups, like the situation currently playing out off Huntington Beach, not only more efficient but also more effective. An estimated 126,000 gallons of heavy crude leaked from a ruptured pipeline into the Pacific Ocean early Saturday, setting off frantic efforts to prevent the oil from washing up onto the area's beaches and into its protected marshlands.
"I think a lot of folks don't realize that when there is an oil spill, in almost all cases, most of the oil is never cleaned up by humans," said Seth Darling, director of the Center for Molecular Engineering at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois. "We clean up some, and the rest Mother Nature eventually cleans up, though not quickly, and it wreaks havoc on the local environment all that time."
Darling and his colleagues at Argonne developed a tool called the Oleo Sponge, which is made by altering the same type of foam that is commonly used in seat cushions and mattresses to make it "oleophilic," which means it can draw in oil without also soaking up water.
At Northwestern University, a team of scientists developed a similar absorbent called the OHM sponge that uses a specially designed magnetic coating to selectively soak up oil in water.
"Oil and water don't mix well, but when they do, it's very difficult to remove," said Vinayak Dravid, a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern, who led the research. "We wanted something that could not only suck up oil but could do it very quickly."
In lab tests, Dravid and his colleagues showed that the OHM sponge could absorb more than 30 times its weight in oil and can be reused more than 40 times without losing its effectiveness.
With both the Oleo Sponge and the OHM sponge, the recovered oil can be used again, which also means less overall waste after spills.
Both Darling and Dravid said their sponges were designed to fill a gap in available technologies to clean up oil spills, offering officials a new way to respond to major incidents like the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, when an estimated 210 million gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. While satellite technologies to map and model oil spills have improved greatly since the Deepwater Horizon spill, the processes for cleanup crews on the water and on beaches have remained mostly stagnant.
"Deepwater Horizon should have driven a lot of innovation but didn't," said John Pardue, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University, who conducted research and ran an advisory program for a land trust in Louisiana in the aftermath of the 2010 spill.
He said it's because resources are typically devoted to studying the spill sites, as well as the effect of leaked oil on the environment and plants and animals in the region, while funding for developing new cleanup tools is usually limited.
"There's been upgrades in modeling how spills move and how oil affects fish and animals in the deep ocean and marshes, but in terms of response work, there were a few things that have been tried but nothing that rose to the level of something that will be used moving forward," Pardue said.
Scientists like Darling and Dravid are hoping to change that.
At present, cleanup crews typically use booms to contain oil spills and prevent them from spreading. The oil can then be skimmed off the surface, but this method is less effective in choppy waters, and waves can push oil deeper into the ocean, where it's much harder to clean.
Another method for removing oil at the water’s surface is to burn it, but there are obvious drawbacks with employing that strategy.
“It does remove a lot of oil from the water, but of course that turns a water pollution problem into an air pollution problem,” Darling said.
Local officials can also spray oil slicks with dispersants, which break oil into smaller droplets that mix more easily with water. The idea is to remove the oil through biodegradation, in which bacteria and other microorganisms naturally feed on the oil and essentially remove it from the environment.
With the Oleo Sponge, Darling said it's a new type of absorbent that can sop up spills at the surface and when oil has seeped deeper into the water column. And since the sponges can be reused, they are a "greener" alternative to the tools currently available.
In 2017, the researchers tested the sponges in a giant seawater tank in New Jersey and demonstrated that they could collect diesel and crude oil both below and on the water's surface. The scientists also tested the Oleo Sponge at a natural oil seep off the California coast, near Santa Barbara, to assess how it works in real-world environments.
Darling said the Coast Guard and private companies have expressed interest in the Oleo Sponge. The goal now, he said, is to find a partner to handle manufacturing the sponges at large scales.
With the OHM sponge, Dravid said he expects the technology to be commercially available soon. He added that his team has already sent samples to colleagues in California to help with recovery efforts at and around Huntington Beach.
In addition to cleanup efforts on the water, Dravid and his colleagues are exploring how the OHM sponge can be modified to soak up oil that washes up on beaches or to assist with cleaning up other types of hazardous contamination.
Dravid said he's eager for his research to have an impact, but it comes with a bittersweet cost.
"It's odd because on the one hand, we're excited for the opportunity to show how this technology can make a difference," he said. "But with oil spills, we're always sad for the environmental side of things."
Broken SoCal Oil Pipeline Moved 100 Feet From Charted Position
On Tuesday, the U.S. Coast Guard said that dive and ROV investigations have confirmed unusual signs of damage to the oil pipeline that spilled 125,000 gallons of crude off the coast of Orange County, California last weekend.
According to the unified response command, a section of pipeline of about 4,000 feet in length has shifted position by about 100 feet. One segment has a 13-inch split - the likely source of the oil release - and officials said that the damage is not consistent with "normal wear and tear" on the pipeline. Divers have confirmed that the breach is no longer spilling oil, and the pipeline operator has applied suction to both ends of the 17.7-mile line in an attempt to keep any remaining crude inside.
The cause of the accident is still under investigation. On Monday, USCG Capt. Rebecca Ore - the commander of Coast Guard Sector LA/Long Beach - said that the pipeline may have been damaged by a ship's anchor, among other possibilities.
"These ships are anchored and many are awaiting entry into the San Pedro Bay Port complex - the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach - and . . . it is possible that they would transit over a pipeline," said Capt. Ore.
The command also responded to questions about the response timeline. The USCG's National Response Center was notified of an offshore spill on Friday evening, but the Coast Guard did not initiate a spill response effort until Saturday morning. In an explanation, the unified command said that the early reports could not be confirmed until Saturday due to restricted visibility, and the spill was spotted as soon as the fog lifted.
As of Tuesday morning, response crews have recovered neary 5,000 gallons of oil, cleaned six miles of shoreline and deployed almost two miles of containment boom. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency to free up federal funds for the spill response, and he is due to visit the scene on Tuesday.
"The state is moving to cut red tape and mobilize all available resources to protect public health and the environment," said Gov. Newsom. "As California continues to lead the nation in phasing out fossil fuels and combating the climate crisis, this incident serves as a reminder of the enormous cost fossil fuels have on our communities and the environment."
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