How a San Francisco Oil Spill Took Its Toll on Fish
Bryan Walsh
Time Magazine
12/28/2011
How quickly have Americans forgotten about the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Fast enough that that last week BP launched an advertising blitz aimed at giving a “progress report” on the company’s cleanup efforts. It’s nothing new for the company—BP started bombarding the country with its widely derided “BP Cares” ads while the oil spill was still ongoing last year—and it hardly means BP is done fighting the government on responsibility for the spill. The Interior Department has slapped BP with regulatory violation notices that will lead to fines related to the spill—fines BP says it will appeal. Still, I doubt BP would greenlight another set of ads unless it felt public attention had so waned on the spill that it wanted to get some credit by reminding Americans that it was still out there doing good work.
But that doesn’t mean the impacts of an oil spill end when Anderson Cooper goes home. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks at the aftermath of a 2007 oil spill in San Francisco Bay, and finds the accidents has had lingering effects on local fish—effects that continued well after the spill was cleaned up.
On a foggy morning on November 7, 2007, the container ship Cosco Busan collided with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, spilling some 54,000 gallons of bunker oil into the bay. That’s more than 3,000 times smaller than the Gulf of Mexico spill, but the fact that the accident occurred in crowded coastal waters meant that the spill was more concentrated. The Deepwater Horizon, by contrast, was more than 40 miles away from shore, and much of the oil dispersed or weathered before reaching land. A concentrated spill—like the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident—can be far more damaging for wildlife.
That’s what researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and several universities found. Looking at the Pacific herring—an important commercial fish—the team found that bunker oil had accumulated in naturally spawned herring embryos. The oil then interacted with sunlight at low tides, when the light could penetrate the shallow water, to kill the embryos in large numbers.
