The images are all too familiar. A person holding a seabird while a second person is scrubbing the bird with soapy water working to get the oil slick off so the bird can fly again. It’s an arduous process, sometimes having to put the bird in as many as eight to ten baths. On Saturday it was near Newport and Huntington Beaches, California.
About 126,000 gallons of crude leaked from an offshore oil rig, the kind that’s supposed to be foolproof. Only it isn’t. In last decade, there have been an average of 1.8 spills from tankers that were over 700 metric tons. That’s a lot of oil. Most of them we don’t even hear about.
The cause of the oil spill seen on Saturday was a pipeline breach five miles off the coast and affected the Talbert Wetlands, a 180-acre wildlife habitat. Hundreds of dead birds and fish are now on the shore. The Coast Guard believes the pipeline had been leaking for days before being seen by aerial surveillance. Where was the company that owns the pipeline? What kind of surveillance did it practice?
Prayer for the Day
Complacent with our lives, we avoid painful truths,
Preferring the darkness to the light,
Caught in our own ineptitude, we flounder in despair,
Refusing to acknowledge how we actually live.
Forgive us and move us beyond our self-satisfaction
And bring us into true repentance opening us to your life
In the name of him who is your life in the world,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
We pull out of the ground death, we burn death in our power plants, and then we act shocked when we get death in the form of oil spills and global warming.
Van Jones, CNN political commentator
It’s a fact of life that we will always have oil spills, as long as oil is moved from place to place, but we must have provision to deal with them, and a capability that is commensurate with the size of oil shipments.
Sylvia Earle, American marine biologist
And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1: 20-21