The number of liveaboards in the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor complicates the cleanup effort, says Laura Kasa, the executive director of Save Our Shores. “Everything that they owned was on these boats that went down, so there may have been cleaners, whatever they used to clean their boat—any of those toxins are going to be leeched out.”
As of Tuesday, news reports put the number of sunken vessels at 18, with 10 boats unaccounted for and some 100 damaged. Harbor officials estimated the damage to five of the harbor’s 26 docks at $22.5 million, with another $4 million in damages to privately owned boats.
But the full environmental impact of the tsunami surge was still unknown on Monday. “We’ve been searching for any information on how much pollution has come out, and we haven’t been successful at finding anything at this point,” Kasa said, adding that officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the state Fish and Game Department were on hand assessing damages.
Diesel fuel fumes wafted up from the murky water, one early suggestion of the environmental consequences of the surges. “There is a lot of fuel coming up in the water—you can just smell it. It smells like diesel fuel,” said Lauren Gilligan, who helps coordinate Save Our Shores’ DockWalker program to prevent boating pollution.
When a boat begins to fill with water, an automatic bilge pump that sits at the bottom will begin pumping water out to keep the craft afloat. Gilligan explains that the problem is that, even under the best circumstances, “the engine sits right above that water, so it constantly is leaking oil and pumping it out.” In cases where the entire boat is submerged the pollution risk becomes a certainty: all of its fuel will eventually leak out.
In addition to gas, small splintered bits of boat and dock have continued to accumulate on the harbor’s surface. “Parts of the docks are coming off. Unfortunately, underneath the dock is a lot Styrofoam-type material. It’s very buoyant—that’s why they use it—but it also crumbles really quick into smaller and smaller pieces,” said Emily Glanville, a manager for Save Our Shores. “That stuff is all over now.”
