Several West Coast senators, including Washington Democrats Patty
Murray and Maria Cantwell, introduced legislation Thursday to
permanently ban offshore drilling in all federal waters off the coasts
of California, Oregon and Washington.
The bill was dropped in the
Congressional hopper as a coalition of Northwest conservation and
fishing groups said in a teleconference that the oil spill in the Gulf
of Mexico should be a call for action to halt ocean oil drilling and
move faster to a clean-energy future.
“This kind of disaster is
inevitable,” said Ross Macfarlane, a senior policy adviser for Climate
Solutions, a Seattle-based clean-energy group. “We absolutely need to
stop drilling off the West Coast and Alaska.”
Former President
George W. Bush and Congress allowed a 20-year ban on oil drilling off
the Washington coast to expire in 2008. Oil exploration off the state’s
coast has been dormant since the 1960s.
The ocean off Washington is deep and plagued by wild weather, which
increases the risk of drilling accidents, Cantwell said. In addition,
the Washington coast is part of an active West Coast seismic zone where
an earthquake could trigger a disastrous oil spill and hamper response
efforts.
“I’ve always opposed drilling off the coast of
Washington,” Murray said in a prepared statement. “The current tragedy
in the Gulf Coast is a painful reminder that we can’t allow drilling
anywhere on the West Coast.”
Up to 210,000 gallons per day of oil
is spewing from an undersea well since a BP oil drilling rig exploded
April 20, killing 11 workers. The spill is threatening the environment
and economy of the Gulf region with no surefire plan to stem the flow of
oil.
Included in the conference call was Margaret Bryan Curole of
Galliano, La., a board member for Commercial Fishermen of America. Her
husband also pilots an oil service boat on the Gulf Coast.
“The
jobs here are either in commercial fishing or the commercial oil
industry,” she said. “People are sacred, angry and they don’t know what
to do.”
If the nation is going to wean itself off oil, the Gulf
Coast – home to 60 percent of the nation’s oil reserves – will need a
massive jobs-retraining program, Curole said.
Alaskan marine
toxicologist and commercial fisher Riki Ott said there are striking
similarities between the Gulf oil spill and the Exxon Valdez in Prince
William Sound 21 years ago.
“It starts with all the unkept
promises of the oil companies to follow the environmental laws and the
reliance on outdated oil-spill-response equipment,” she said from
Louisiana. “We’re going to see holes in the ecosystem down here just
like the herring collapse in Prince William Sound years after the Exxon
Valdez spill.”
Fishermen in the Northwest can’t help but feel the
pain of their counterparts in the Gulf Coast, who are watching the
runaway oil spill destroy their lives, said Pete Knutson, a
Seattle-based commercial fisherman in the North Pacific since 1972.
“We
need to use this moment in the Gulf to raise hell with our politicians
in Washington, D.C.,” Knutson said of the call to halt ocean oil
drilling and switch to cleaner-energy sources.
Oil reserves off
the West Coast would only meet the nation’s demand for oil for 500 days –
less time than it can take to clean up a serious oil spill, the
senators said.
“Ultimately, the overarching lesson from the mess
in the Gulf is that we need to diversify our nation off of oil,”
Cantwell said.
– The News Tribune
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