Betrayed!

The pervasive feeling of dis-satisfaction most of us felt last week-end over the ineptitude of the various government agencies in handling the oil spill in San Francisco Bay has now been replaced with a downright sense of betrayal. Birds lie dying on the beaches. Volunteers who came to help were turned away or warned of arrest if they ventured onto oil covered beaches to clean up the goo. Authorities warned of toxic issues if one handled the oil or of dire consequences if you took matters into your own hands.

That left plenty of beachfront uncleaned and soiled with oil blogs. It has left piles of birds dead. And each day brings more birds up on the beaches. It has also left a lot of folks with a sense of outrage that such a thing could be happening here. Here, in the Bay Area, with a population that pays their taxes and expects the government to do their work. Here, where the environment enjoys a very high ranking in how things 'should be'. Here, where (until this week, at any rate) we thought that if The Worst should happen, then 'somebody' must be going to take care of it. But... they didn't. They haven't. And it appears, they aren't going to do it now.

Tonight, on local news, they showed a state assemblywoman who is screaming for hearings on who messed up and didn't handle the oil spill properly. She was hopping mad at the Coast Guard since they had primary jurisdiction in the clean up effort. She said they hadn't co-ordinated the efforts on down through the counties and cities and that's why nobody knew who was in charge and things were going into disarray. The Coast Guard handed the finger pointing off to another Federal agency, the National Transportation Safety Board, to decide who is at fault. They said it didn't matter to them if the State of California was going to have hearings on how poorly they did, they didn't have to answer to anybody in the state only the Feds, and they wouldn't bother to show up, thank you. One little city was screaming angry that nobody from the federal or state level had showed up to clean their beaches or look for oiled birds until six days after the tanker spilled its load. Counties are hiding behind their admissions of waiting for the feds or state to tell them what to do. Indeed, it doesn't appear that Anybody is really in charge.

For the population, this is scary and horrible. This is only an oil spill of fifty thousand gallons, mind you. This isn't a massive seven or eight Richter earthquake. Or something as terrible as a big bomb. If the government is handling this Oil Spill so badly, do you honestly think they would be able to handle a big disaster that much better? Maybe that's why we feel so betrayed and uneasy over the handling of this. We know, in our hearts, if Doomsday struck, we aren't going to be able to count on Uncle Sam or Arnold to lead us to safety. We're going to have to count on ourselves and band together, good and bad, to see to it that we survive.

The Bay Area folks shouldn't be that surprised. We have only to look back two years ago at Katrina to see how New Orleans fared to see what we've got going on in our front yard now. The people in New Orleans have been trying to get us to see what they've been forced to deal with since then and maybe we weren't watching. But, I betcha, we're watching now!