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HOW TO GATHER EVIDENCE IN AN OIL SPILL
“The disastrous oil spill near Woods Hole that occurred in September 1969, gave me some faint hope that the environment will be able to recover if and when pollution is cleaned up.
When the barge, Florida, belonging to the Northeast Petroleum Company went aground off West Falmouth, Massachusetts, approximately 170,000 gallons of No. 2 fuel oil spilled into the water. In the days that followed, the shorelines were littered with almost continuous windrows of dead fish and dying marine invertebrates. “It was clearly evident that we were viewing a massive and immediate kill of at least the larger and more obvious organisms belonging to the entire spectrum of animal life found in the area,” wrote Dr. Howard Sanders of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who with his colleagues investigated the spill.
If such an oil spill had to happen anywhere, it is probably best that it happened at Woods Hole where there were dedicated scientists who took the time off from their regular duties and research programs to make an ecological survey. Furthermore, the fauna of Woods Hole is perhaps better known than that of any other location in the United States.
Dr. Sanders, Max Blumer, George Hampson of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Paul Shave, a commercial biological collector, worked frantically to inventory the dying organisms. They learned that certain forms such as amphipods were highly susceptible to the oil, while nematodes were relatively resistant. The presence of oil and benthic mortality were detected down to 42 feet, and after the initial mortality which killed off thousands of large and small animals, the oil remained in the habitats and continued to kill. As the oil was liberated from the muddy bottoms, secondary mortality was still occurring.
For many months, the waters and substrate in Wild Harbor were completely dead. Marshes turned black and died off, but life started slowly creeping back in. As many as 2000 small drab polychaetes (Capitella capitata) that live in a small tube appeared in each shovelful of sand. Capitella capitata is a worldwide pollution indicator. A great many blue mussels that lived on the rocks and banks were killed off, but a few survived, although with shrunken and emasculated gonads.
George Hampson told me how Mya, the soft-shelled clam, made gyrating pits and craters in the mud. They made the tide flat look like the surface of the moon, and before they died, they were seen with their siphons extended, lying limp or gyrating in the sand. This is most unusual behavior for them. Normally when you are clamming, you have to throw a rock on a bed or dig rapidly to make Mya reveal itself by its frightening spurt of water. And then it promptly digs down and out of sight. They extend their siphons at night only, and can then be captured with a blinding gasoline lantern. Razor clams also failed to retract into the mud, and they too died. The death list went on and on—quahog clams, lugworms, eels, crabs, killifish, and mud shrimp. The sands were stained yellow, and the air reeked of oil. Bushels of snails were dead and rotten ooze poured out of their shells.
George Hampson and Howard Sanders had some recommendations about what to do when there is an oil spill. Immediately after a disaster, a biologist or concerned citizen should rush to the scene and begin gathering dead animals and preserving them. All the soft-bodied animals such as worms, sea anemones, sponges, and ascidians will decompose and wash out to sea in a day or two, and if you wait too long there will be no evidence. Before you know it, the beach will show no sign that it was once full of dead animals, and the entire area will simply be denuded of life.
However, even if you arrive late on the scene, you can get a good “before” picture by carefully looking for the remains of dead animals. By sifting sand, you can often find the remains of dead amphipods that have a hard shell, which does not deteriorate. Snail shells with their operculum intact are evidence of a kill, and even the horny proboscis of clam worms can tell of the numbers of worms that were killed.
It may take several days before the multitudes of dead bottom invertebrates and fish begin washing inshore. The beach should then be rigorously patrolled. Take five-gallon cans, jars, or buckets of 15 percent Formalin and drop the animals in as you find them. If they are rotten, save them anyway; although during an oil spill, the animals do not decompose readily. However, if there is a thermal discharge from a nuclear power plant or death caused by anoxia, decomposition sets in very rapidly.
It is most important that you take pictures of dead animals to supplement your preserved collections. These pictures can be later used as conclusive evidence on the effects of the pollution. It is also important to take pictures of the physical shoreline because after the oil spill, erosion characteristically sets in. As the tube worms and other tiny creatures that bind sand grains together with mucus and excretions are killed off, the sand begins to shift and piles up on the sand flats.
After the Wild Harbor spill, the oil company sent in “clean up” crews which immediately began raking up the oily sand and gathering dead animals for disposal. A similar “clean up” crew was sent in to dispose of tons of fish killed by Con Edison’s power plant in the Hudson River. They hauled them off by the truckload and buried them hastily with bulldozers.
It is imperative that you get in ahead of these “clean up” crews because while they are ridding the beaches of dead animals in the name of public health, they are very conveniently removing evidence of their destruction. Then during subsequent pollution hearings, spokesmen and attorneys will claim that their pollution did little or no damage to fish and wildlife.
Unlike the spills at Santa Barbara and Puerto Rico, the Wild Harbor spill did not have a dramatic effect on bird life. A few terns and clapper rails were soaked with oil, but it was not like other oil spills where birds died by the thousands.
And when I visited Wild Harbor in Falmouth, Massachusetts, almost a year later, I saw numbers of birds walking around portions of the marsh that had not been too heavily polluted. Wild Harbor is a beautiful area; one has only to stand on the road and view this magnificent march area and adjoining little pond and quaint, colonial-style New England houses to realize the damage that was done and the heartbreak of the residents.
Many people from Falmouth went clamming at Wild Harbor, but they will probably never be allowed to clam there again. Dead clamshells were everywhere, and even though thousands of juvenile Mya clams had recolonized the area, they would probably never be fit to eat because it has been shown by Max Blumer that hydrocarbons from the spill concentrate in their tissues and never leave once they are accumulated. In fact, the hydrocarbons are passed on and magnified in predatory organisms higher in the food chain.
Perhaps in five to ten years the rest of Wild Harbor will return to normal. It still doesn’t have the large polychaete worms, or many of the crabs and larger fish, but the tide flats are showing some hopeful signs o0f recovery. Working with the scientists of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, we seined small grass shrimp (Crangon) and a number of killifish from the oil-soaked mudflats. Large patches of the once expansive green marsh were black and dead, but a few green shoots were popping up through the oily sands.
With the falling tide, a shimmering iridescent oil slick appeared at the border of the polluted marsh and lapped in and out of the ebb and flow of the water. It was painful to look at the destruction, and every step through the mud brought out a fresh gush of oil. But there were fiddler crabs living in the dead marsh, digging burrows through the oil-saturated substrate. The sand siftings still contained thousands of Capitella capitata, but their numbers were diminishing as the fish and shrimp were gobbling them up.
I found some colonies of pink sea anemones and sponges growing on the bridge over Wild Harbor, which had not been badly polluted. There was still life in Wild Harbor and signs that the area may recover. But we can ask ourselves, how long until the next time? The only was to discourage polluters is to get involved.
Whenever an oil spill, a pollution discharge from an outfall, or a fish kill occurs, there are series of steps you can take to report it to the proper authority and get some action.
- Report your findings to the regional office of your state Air and Water Pollution Control Board.
- Report the disaster to your state Department of Natural Resources (salt water or fresh water division, depending on the location of the pollution.
- Notify your local Audubon Society, Sierra Club or other conservation organizations. Team up with other conservationists in the area, invite them to look at the damaged area, and write letters.
- Notify the newspapers and give them all the facts, especially information on the species that were killed, how many, and so on. The only action that will fight a pollution problem is publicity and public support, and radio, television, and newspapers are the best way to obtain this. Give the public the facts; tell them that the salt marshes are valuable and how important the tiny marine fauna are and how they can be easily destroyed.
It is going to take a willingness on the part of industries and municipalities to clean up our waters, not full-page ads in popular news magazines. Effluents will have to be monitored and their effects frequently tested. At long last our society is beginning to wake up to our environmental problems. A decade ago, there would have been little concern raised over an oil spill or a build-up of poisonous trace metals in the waters. But now there are pollution control boards, and people who once were laughed at as “butterfly chasers” and “bird watchers” are finally being listened to. But it is not a moment too soon.”
-Jack Rudloe
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