Maria Cant(do)well and the enviro community are adament about not
removing
a size restriction on tankers coming into Puget Sound (the Magnuson
Amendment)
Their claim is the danger of an oil spill of one of those supertankers.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist seeing the size of the tankers
that are daily plying
the strait to realize that should one of those hit the rocks, it
would create a
mammoth oil spill anyway.
The facts:
1- Tankers come into the Strait of Juan de Fuca,
a narrow, rocky passage
all without pilots.
After they get to Port Angeles where the strait widens
out into Puget Sound,
(calm, protected water) they pick up a pilot. So
they traverse
the really dangersous part of the voyage sans pilot but get
one for the easy part.
2- Back in the 80s, a tanker skipper went to sleep
while traversing this narrow
rocky passage and ran
his boat up on the beach at Whiskey Creek. Only
a miracle of chance kept
him off the rocks which are prominent on either
side of that short sandy
beach.
3- The Strait of Juan de Fuca is the neck of the
Puget Sound bottle. There is
an enormous amount of
water that must move through the strait with each
change in the tide.
A spill in the strait would be in Seattle overnight, augmented
by the stong winds that
whistle through the strait.
4- So, why do the congress persons worry about
the size of a tanker, but not
the safety of the ships
that ply the strait (each carrying enough oil to cause a
major spill)?
Well, like most everything in DC, the answer is political:
a) They do not want
to do anything that would facilitate the extraction of our
own oil from the North
Alaskan desert (ANWR). The "so called environmental"
organizations contribute
heavily to politicians who block that extraction, they
say the environment is
better off if we buy oil extracted from the Saudi desert.
b) The pilot's union is
rich and powerful and backed by other unions. The
pilots much prefer to
spend their idle time in the flesh pots of Port Angeles as
opposed to sitting out
in a remote Indian village (Neah Bay) waiting for a ship
I have been aware of this situation for a long
time, but, in the interests of accuracy
I called the Coast Guard to see if somehow it
might have changed without any
publicity. The response of the information
officer: "Yep, it's till as it has always
been - - rediculous, isn't it?"
How about a little reality here??? . . . . . . . . JMC