Photo by Michael Macor/ Chronicle
Was the cleanup immediately privatized and which one of the Bush cronies got the job? And will he delegate it to a smaller unheard-of corporation who will hire a band of illegals to scoop the crude into boxes and sell it as fuel oil to poor people?
First of all, you let citizens get involved. Article found via Libby of The Newshoggers who also pointed out the sentence below in bold.
Loyalty oath? From concerned and involved citizens who are volunteering their time? Who the hell thought that up? LOYALTY OATH??Emergency officials more than doubled the number of ships and cleanup workers attacking the massive oil spill throughout the Bay Area - while hundreds of frustrated citizens who tried to help were turned away from contaminated beaches and so-called training sessions.
"We're going at the problem with everything we can, and making some good headway," said Sheri Eng, petty officer with the Coast Guard, which is helping lead the cleanup effort. "There's a lot of oil out there."
[snip]
By the end of today, the National Transportation Safety Board is expected to take over the lead of the investigation, since the primary responsibility for the spill will apparently lie with the staff of the ship that caused it. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein is due to arrive Sunday to tour the catastrophe by air and confer with disaster officials.
The Coast Guard has been the lead agency until now, and is the lead agency for the initial response to all big oil spills in the bay. It has been taking heat from officials from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., for both the cleanup effort and for its slowness in getting word of the huge size of the spill out to the public after it happened.
[snip]
At the volunteer meeting, everyone at the gathering was given an official-looking state volunteer application to fill out, complete with a loyalty oath. The fish and game people said volunteers might be contacted later, for non-hazardous duties.
"It's frustrating" said Ryan Gross of San Francisco. "I want to help, I don't want to sit home and do nothing. But that's what they told us to do."
Addassi assured the crowd that dozens of official beach cleaners were at work around the Bay Area, but many people at the meeting reported going to oily beaches and seeing little or no official cleanup taking place.
Some of the people at the meeting said they had already tried to do their own, unofficial cleanups and been ordered off the beaches by cops and threatened with citations or worse.
Beth Brown of San Francisco said she and her boyfriend spent about 15 minutes cleaning Baker Beach on Saturday morning, filling a couple of plastic bags with oily clumps. Then a park ranger and a cop appeared, told her the beach was closed and threatened them with arrest.
"I want to do what they want us to do but, right now, they want us to do nothing," Brown said. "And I can't do nothing."
Shades of FEMA!
8 comments:
Loyalty to whom or what? Are they asking people to take an oath to uphold the constitution or the administration? And why should they? Do you think Al Qaeda volunteers want to help clean up the Bay?
I want to know who is in charge, who is giving the orders. Who is refusing to let the community get involved.
Do you know what a bonding event that can be? How a community is drawn together by such an event? How saving animals and cleaning up can be life affirming? Who the hell thought it was necessary to actually arrest people who were cleaning up?
WTF?!
Clearly al-Qaeda is involved with everything that goes bad in our country and around the world forever into eternity, amen.
"Loyalty to whom or what?" - michael
Michael, the world must be coming to an end... I opened this thread with the intent of making exactly the same comment you did! :) (Actually, we come to the same conclusions fairly often, even if by vastly different paths.)
What is it with this sort of people? Shades of FEMA after Katrina, indeed! That time, according to Bryan, there were military personnel and supplies in place, waiting just offshore, ready to help with (among other things) fresh water, and forbidden because they lacked an order to do so. Do I sense a pattern here?
I'm expecting Blackwater to show up at any minute to help "clean up" the birds...
Of course the only loyalty oath they'll sign is their paychecks.
As some people have suggested, the incompetence is deliberate. Train the people to expect nothing from the government.
And Blackwater would just ignite the oil and flambe the birds. Stoopid birds...
Stoopid birds.
I'm laughing and I'm crying.
"I'm laughing and I'm crying."
I hear you, michael. We've all been doing that since November of 2000.
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