etflies
Keeping calm, Chiving on.
Told ya!!! Many decades ago when I had decided to buy my first longboard, I took that advice from an old longboarder who was surfing back in the 40's and 50's and I never looked back. So glad you had fun. The experience will get even better or you as you discover just how marvelous a large/deep single is.
The clean up is a mess. While there is some cleanup going on at the two beaches, the concentration has been at sea and the recovery was hampered there by the winds that kicked up yesterday. It's an extremely slow process. 9 pelicans were rescued, covered with oil and a few sea lions. But some birds have died and dead, oil covered rays, fish, squids and jellyfish continue to wash up on the sand along with oil covered and dead crabs and lobsters. It will get far worse before it gets better, sadly.
I care for all the wildlife obviously, but my greatest fears are or the mammals, all the sea lions, dolphins, and whales and also the damage to the kelp beds and the algae. This is going to screw up the food chains, the breeding and migration routes for all the wildlife now and the long term damage won't even be known for some time to come. All the mussels, limpets, the soft corals, sand crabs, sea anemones, clams, all the birds (and we have just dozens of marine species of birds here) just everything, will be horribly effected. Several pelicans have died.
They have reclaimed maybe 10 percent of the oil at sea and the cleanup of the beaches will take I imagine, the rest of the year easily. The health risks now to humans is still so great that they will still not let citizens onto the beaches to help with the recovery efforts.
My friends in Santa Barbra went up to the area yesterday to check it out and from even the highway, they said the fumes from the crude oil were so strong, that it made them cough and their eyes and noses burn. When they got to the campgrounds which have all been closed at El Capitan and Refugio, they said it was even worse and one of them got a headache. Goleta now is in danger because of the fumes and how this may affect people and they declared another emergency because of this and are having the air monitored because so many people are complaining about symptoms and feeling ill.
The Feds ordered Plains Pipeline to shut down it's operation finally. The Attorney General has launched an investigation and is preparing to prosecute the bastards at some point.
We are going off to the stores today and buy the items we need and more that can be used over at the rehabilitation center in San Pedro and may be volunteering to clean birds tomorrow. We are going to bring over everything later today and see if they need us yet. They had received around a dozen birds so far when we called them yesterday.
That's awful. Keep us posted, I'm trying to stay up on it but if you hear about regular folks being allowed to come help clean up, I'm in.
