Galveston Bay oil spill threatens bird migration

Published: Sunday, March 23, 2014 at 6:34 a.m.

Last Modified: Sunday, March 23, 2014 at 6:34 a.m.

McALLEN, Texas - Crews armed with infrared cameras planned to work through the night after a barge carrying nearly a million gallons of especially thick, sticky oil collided with a ship in Galveston Bay, leaking an unknown amount of the fuel into the popular bird habitat as the peak of the migratory shorebird season was approaching.

Booms were brought in to try to contain the spill, which the Coast Guard said was reported at around 12:30 p.m. Saturday by the captain of the 585-foot ship, Summer Wind. Coast Guard Lt. j.g. Kristopher Kidd said the spill hadn't been contained as of 10 p.m., and that the collision was still being investigated.

The ship collided with a barge carrying 924,000 gallons of marine fuel oil, also known as special bunker, that was being towed by the vessel Miss Susan, the Coast Guard said. It didn't give an estimate of how much fuel had spilled into the bay, but there was a visible sheen of oil at the scene.

continued

The Bird vs. the Bypass: Tree-Sitter Fights Mendocino Highway Project

By Deborah Svoboda

If you want to talk face-to-face to Warbler, you have to be OK with heights.

Warbler, the name adopted by a 24-year-old farmer, is living indefinitely in a ponderosa pine on the southern outskirts of Willits, up in Mendocino County. She's been up in the tree since the end of January to try to block construction of a four-lane, six-mile, $290 million highway bypass around town.

A couple weeks back, I drove north on U.S. 101 through Marin and Sonoma counties and up into Mendocino to interview Warbler (also known as Amanda Senseman) for a journalism class assignment. I brought along a camera (I'm a photojournalist first) and sound recording equipment (which I was just learning to use). And when I got to Warbler's tree, and she agreed that it was OK, I climbed the 71 feet to her platform--"two rooms," she calls it--overlooking 101.

Why is she up there?

To build the bypass, Caltrans will need to cut down trees along the superhighway-size right-of-way, and that could harm migratory bird species. It will need to fill wetlands along the route, the construction could impact spawning streams for endangered coho salmon and steelhead.

The agency has planned the bypass for decades, and says it's necessary to allow through traffic to avoid the bottleneck of downtown Willits, where U.S. 101 narrows to two lanes. There's debate about whether there's enough traffic through town to justify the project and whether diverting traffic away from downtown will help or hurt the local economy. But Caltrans spokesperson Phil Frisbie Jr. says that as the state's economy rebounds, "Traffic volumes will increase, both for commerce, and people will go out and they'll vacation more, so the need for the bypass as things recover is going to be felt even greater.”

Continued:  http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/03/12/the-bird-vs-the-bypass-tree-sitter-fights-mendocino-highway-project/