Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night
Two controversial news items in two minutes:
Fifty-eight thousand tons of fuel was spilled into the San Francisco Bay on Wednesday, November 7, when a container ship crashed into a Bay Bridge tower, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Two alleged causes: Fog. Language miscommunication.
Two classic symptoms of human error, and yet they reveal a lot about geographic and sociocultural assumptions here in San Francisco. As a barista who has never boarded a major fuel carrier, nor braved the Bay in its densest, pea-soup fog, my first thought upon hearing the news was: "How could they hit a bridge?"
The immediate images that rushed to my mind as I scrubbed counters and steamed milk was of those tragic public ads I used to see on PBS as child (after the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, circa June 1990) of seals covered in tar, small pelicans choking on six-pack soda containers, and drowning, despicable sea life. Oil spills are one example of how we as humans can successfully cancel out all our nonprofit, free-trade, morally conscious do-gooding in one fell swoop. Who knew that a pair of mismatched coordinates could kill as many as 100 birds as far away as Tomales Bay? And how must that crew feel, knowing that one Thursday morning in the Bay could transform an entire underwater ecosystem?
Which brings me to the second conclusion: do all problems in this world boil down to basic miscommunication? The SFGate article alludes to questions regarding the crew's English fluency, although a spokesperson is quoted as saying that the ship's master and crew are all fluent speakers. Somehow even the hint of language ability makes me rile my feathers of political correctness, especially because the inherent error of this catastrophe is at its base entirely human: a missed connection, an unclear command, a mental and literal fog.
Two more twos:
The last Bay Area oil spill of parallel destruction was in 1996, and it took two years to clean 40,000 tons (a mere dab, in comparison).
The San Francisco Triathlon had to cancel its swimming portion, tailoring it down to two events and skirting the obvious risks of contaminated water.
My mother is an admirable open-water swimmer who just braved the Bay waters this past spring. She mentioned that her friends who do the Alcatraz swim used to jump-start their workouts by jumping off boats. All this time I thought the greatest threat in the Bay were sharks.
I'd like to write something prophetic about how this oil spill epitomizes innate human flaw, or showcases the inevitability of random disaster, or proves us that big car culture breeds bad karma, but I find it hard to pin the suffering of underwater creatures on the wandering misjudgment of a tired ship's crew.
Poor birds.
Lavar Burton (one of my heroes) would have an accompanying children's book to suggest, or a one-sentence motif to thread all this together. I wish he were here with us now.
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