An oil spill in my back yard

Two weeks ago, after receiving reports of a petroleum odor, Orange County public works officials discovered an oil spill contaminating the Huntington Beach Channel, a flood-control channel that drains into a protected wetland and the Pacific Ocean. They estimated the spill to be 672 gallons, which traveled 1.8 miles from its suspected source before being stopped by containment efforts.

The contaminated channel is about a mile from my apartment. It parallels Beach Boulevard, running behind neighborhoods of track housing, a number of gated communities, and an elementary school before curving around the large power plant along the PCH to drain into the wetland and ocean near Huntington State Beach. On my way to work this morning, I drove past containment crews stationed on the Atlanta Avenue overpass.

Not cool. The channel is obviously not a place to play or have a picnic — it’s one of those bleak, brutalist landscapes of concrete and corrugated steel prevalent along the waterways of SoCal, where rain washes all the trash and debris of the streets — but it is figuratively in my back yard, and the oil, had it not been put in check, could have severely disrupted the wetland habitat and perhaps washed up on the beaches. That would have created a huge problem environmentally and commercially; it would have been a huge black eye — literally — for both Huntington Beach and Newport Beach. Try getting tourists to visit a beach tainted with oil, braw.