Visible on Rodeo beach in the photos below are a dozen or so hazardous materials suit clad workers (see enlargement, below), who are nearly indistinguishable from the tens of white bags of oiled beach material that line the north end of the beach’s high tide line.

On November 7th, a container ship, the Cosco Busan, struck a glancing blow to one of the San Francisco Bay Bridge’s support fenders. The bridge was unaffected, but the Cosco Busan suffered a 40 meter gash 4 meters above the water line, which ruptured fuel tanks containing viscous bunker oil. Within an hour or so 220,000 liters had spilled into the bay, and within a day or two the oil had reached as far north as Bolinas lagoon (the mouth of which lies just below the northern most ridge visible in the bottom photo), and as far south as Hayward, a distance spanning 80 kilometers.

Kirby Cove, photographed the week before and published in this blog’s previous entry, was heavily oiled, and presumably tidal zone organisms were affected. The bottom photo was taken from a point just north of the lighthouse at Point Bonita (the light house is located on the Golden Gate’s northern, ocean side), and Kirby Cove is about 3 kilometers closer to San Francisco Bay on the same side of the Gate.

All of the coast visible in the picture below was affected by the oil spill, but the only 5% (or less) was actively being cleaned up, as is visible by looking at the coast in the other photos from this set.

Clicking the photo below will take you to the contact sheet for that day (and away from this web log).

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under California, Ecology, General, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, San Francisco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.