Though the state’s reluctance to allow volunteer help to get involved in the Bay oil spill clean up without training seems strange from the outside, the question of liability if any untrained volunteers are somehow hurt is probably part of the cause.
Daniel Weintraub: Government leaves helpers high, dry after oil spill
By Daniel Weintraub -
Published 12:00 am PST Tuesday, November 13, 2007
The San Francisco Bay Area has long been a hotbed of civil disobedience. So it was only appropriate that, even as government authorities tried their best to keep volunteers from helping with the cleanup from last week's big fuel spill, a man from Marin led a group of monks-in-training on a covert mission to save a beach.
Sigward Moser was the ringleader, according to an account in the San Francisco Chronicle. He and about 30 others, including 20 aspiring monks from the Mill Valley Zen Center, ventured onto Muir Beach on Saturday afternoon. They scraped up 500 bags of oil-laden sand before The Man – in this case a National Park ranger – put Moser in handcuffs and led him away.
He was cited for entering a restricted area and failing to obey an official order, and then released. No word on the whether the monks were also detained.
Funny? Sure. You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. But the story also illustrates a serious problem with the government's response to last week's spill of 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel after a ship slammed into a concrete support under the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
