When Making Money Is More Important Than The Environment … 4 comments
We have a perfect example in The San Francisco Bay Area this weekend, the weekend after the oil spill. Hundreds of people headed towards the bay and the beaches to clean oil from the sand only to be turned away or arrested by local authorities.
Things were more tense Friday in Marin County, where Sigward Moser led a 30-person volunteer group – including 20 monks-in-training from the Mill Valley Zen Center – onto Muir Beach. For his efforts, he was detained and handcuffed.
The little army managed to scoop up nearly 500 bags of gloppy, sandy oil between 2 and 5 p.m. Moser said it was easy duty: “It rolls up like kitty litter, right off the surface of the sand. Went right into the bags with no problem.”
They got almost all the oil they could find – and then a National Park Service ranger showed up.
“He asked us to leave, and we said we needed to do what we were doing, so he put me in handcuffs,” said Moser, a communications consultant. “I told him, ‘Well, there was nobody else doing the cleanup before we began.’ But he just said I was breaking the law and this is hazardous material that I shouldn’t be dealing with.”
Moser was cited for two misdemeanors – failure to obey an official order and entry into a restricted area – and released.
Now he has 500 bags of glop in his yard, and he has no idea how to get rid of it.
It also seems that one of the reasons for turning away the public is that there is big money in cleaning up after an environmental accident. Instead of utilizing volunteers to start cleaning up, officials are only allowing paid and trained workers to clean, thus allowing the effects of the spill to last much longer than it would otherwise. And it’s not giving volunteers the training to go out onto the beaches to help.
Why are volunteers not being allowed to work? Because, apparently, the general public is just too stupid to know how to handle the toxicity of the oil. And these would-be volunteers are the same people that use bleach and ammonia (not together, they aren’t that stupid), which are also toxic chemicals, to clean random stains in their own homes?
KGO News Report: Frustrated Oil Spill Volunteers Turned Away
KRON News Report: Training Session Attendees Told To Go Home
It just makes me so cranky …
4 Responses to 'When Making Money Is More Important Than The Environment …'
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This is George Bush and Dick Cheney’s America…we have all allowed this to happen and done almost NOTHING to stop them.
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I know it’s popular to blame everything on GWB and the decay of society as we know it, but I suspect there’s another explanation for this weirdness.
Things didn’t work out so well for Mr. Moser, did they? He now has 500 bags of toxic waste. What’s he going to do with them?
But the real problem is simply that large judgments against cities and towns with “deep pockets” are common in the U.S. So even if you’d like to get volunteer help, it’s probably forbidden by your insurance, and even if it’s not, if someone gets hurt and sues, your rates are going to go up a lot more than they would if you’d been working with a business with their own insurance.
There’s no easy fix for this. I think the current situation is broken, but I have no idea how we’d go about fixing it.
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FWIW: San Francisco and Berkeley has done some training and yesterday volunteers were finally allowed to begin working. Pelosi, Feinstein, and Boxer ripped the local gov’ts for their ineptness.
It’s just so weird that the first thought that comes to people’s minds is the possibility of any number of lawsuits. (Not your mind, I mean it’s been in the news quite a bit).
I would just like to comment on USA law as I am from Canada and the same thing happen ’s here ..what is the mighty old dollar that the grovement might lose out on ..they don’t care if a oil spill takes longer to clean ..they more on .your breaking the law ..its a shame they the public wants to help….but the law makers ….won’t let you ..shame on the law makers of the usa …jay