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I am the smell.

Scott Breneman sold the black cod and red snapper he caught locally at the Dolly Fishing Fleet and Market in Newport Beach. He recalled that moment when he first noticed The pungent smell of crude oil permeated the air. He was on his boat, the stench was so strong, his instinct was to check his engine for leaks.

In late October, the Huntington Beach City Council voted for a ban on offshore oil drilling. "If there were no such leaks, I don't know if this would happen," Nagami said.

"We are entering [port], and I hopped around the cabin because you can smell it," Brenman said. He checked everything. The engine is good, the hatch is sealed, and any containers that might overflow are intact. Nothing leaked, but the smell of oil was everywhere. "All my sailors can smell it," he said. "We were like,'What the hell is going on?'"

Breneman did not know at the time that the submarine oil pipeline from Long Beach to the offshore oil platform near Huntington Beach ruptured, causing oil to leak into the Pacific Ocean. Most of the crude oil washed ashore flows to the sands of Huntington Beach, including the 25-acre ecological reserve called Talbot Marsh. Tar and oil lumps have been found up and down the Orange County coastline in Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, and Dana Point. Some tar was washed into San Diego County in the south.

Marine life, including a few mammals such as some seabirds and sea lions, died. The cleanup of some of the affected beaches lasted more than a month. Officials closed the beaches in the affected areas for a few days to a week or more. Immediately after the spill, local authorities issued a fishing closure order, banning the collection of fish and shellfish from 650 square miles of sea water and 45 miles of coastline, and closing the border includes all bays from Seal Beach to St. Onofre State Beach And the port. The fishing ban was finally lifted on November 30th.

Despite this, many people are still cautious about eating local seafood. Below is the information you need to know to make an informed decision.

A 17.5-mile-long oil pipeline about 4 miles offshore in Orange County ruptured, forming an oil slick covering about 13 square miles. It is believed that the culprit was the towing anchor of a cargo ship, which may have damaged the pipeline.

The initial estimate of the leak was 126,000 gallons, but the total leak was close to 25,000 gallons. Compared with other leaks in California in the past, the scale of the Orange County leak is quite small.

For example, in 1969, a catastrophic blowout occurred at the United Oil Drilling Platform near Santa Barbara, causing 4.2 million gallons of viscous black crude oil to flow into the ocean and cover nearby coasts, resulting in the death of dozens of seabirds and other marine life. There have also been other smaller but still terrifying spills near Orange County.

In 1976, an oil tanker exploded in the Port of Los Angeles, killing 9 people and releasing 1.2 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. In 1990, on Huntington Beach, an oil tanker named American Trader ran into its anchor. The resulting accident caused approximately 416,000 gallons of crude oil to leak into the water, killing thousands of seabirds.

On October 3, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife closed the affected area and banned fishing, including approximately 650 square miles of sea water. Over a period of two months, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) sampled seafood from the area to see if leaked hazardous chemicals (such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, called PAH) were retained. These chemicals will accumulate in certain marine organisms, and if humans eat them, they may cause cancer or other diseases. Stationary organisms (such as oysters and mussels) are the focus of the test because these animals may take longer to show dangerous PAH concentrations than fish. On November 30, after negotiating with OEHHA that eating seafood from the affected areas would not endanger public health, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife lifted the blockade. Since then, fishing in the affected waters has resumed.

In a word: Disheartened. Most of the seafood we eat in the United States is imported. The local seafood we consume is purchased through a highly regulated and scientifically driven fishery management system-and it can be said that it has been very successful in managing sustainable fishing stocks, especially on the west coast of the United States to become like Steve Escobar. To be a successful local fisherman, you must follow the rules, even if they are a bit complicated.

"I have been fishing for more than 30 years," said Escobar, who sold his crabs and lobsters in the Dolly Fleet. He said that business at the Dory Fleet Market, which has been selling seafood since 1891, slowed down after the leak and subsequent news of the fishery closure. He believes that customers believe that due to the closure, Dory Fleet does not have any seafood to sell.

But in fact, it's not. The fishermen of Dory Fleet follow the rules, and when they can do it, they start fishing further offshore, away from enclosed areas. "We will never catch and sell it in a closed area. I will never do it, nor will any fisherman I know, because the risk of losing the permit is too high and it is now difficult to obtain," Escobar said.

Breneman's family has been selling seafood in Dory Fleet since the early 1900s, and he focused on sourcing unaffected catches in deep water 100 miles offshore. However, he said that with the closure of the fishing industry, business has slowed because it is believed that all locally caught seafood is contaminated, even if they are caught outside the closed area.

"We hardly realized what we were doing, how we were fishing and where we were fishing," Breneman said. He tries to build relationships with his clients so they can learn more about his methods and where he chooses to get his catch.

According to Escobar, business has started to pick up since the fishing ban was lifted. Local lobster fishermen are also trying to make up for lost time. They missed the opening of the California Lobster Season from October to March. "It affected them deeply," Escobar said.

The OC spill is an important example of the importance of establishing relationships with local seafood markets or fishermen. "We want to sell you safe and high-quality seafood. We want to have satisfied customers," Escobar said.

If you buy locally caught seafood, then the products you buy may have passed a highly regulated and monitored system. If something is purchased locally, it is easier to know where and how to capture something. So please talk to your local fishermen. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Especially in a long-running market like Dory Fleet, you will learn more about how they can ensure that your seafood is sustainable and safe to eat.

For more than a century, Big Oil has been an integral part of Southern California's infrastructure. Pipelines and oil derricks are so common, or cleverly hidden, that most people don't even notice them-until they fail.

Damon Nagami grew up in La Palma, Orange County. For him, the oil pump jack is just the background scenery. "I just didn't really think about them," Nagami said. Now, as the senior attorney and director of the Southern California Ecosystem Project of the National Resource Conservation Commission, he focuses on protecting communities and the environment from the effects of oil production. He pointed out that these pump jacks are part of an extensive oil infrastructure throughout Southern California, from the Beverly Hills oil fields to the THUMS Islands in Long Beach.

Sometimes, oil production is obvious at a glance, such as the vast Inglewood oil field, which is one of the largest contiguous urban oil fields in the United States, with an estimated annual production of 2.5 to 3.1 million barrels of oil in the past decade. Some active drilling sites, such as Cardiff Tower on Sipico Avenue, are hidden behind ordinary camouflage walls from the public. Some oil wells are sealed and buried, invisible or invisible unless they explode spectacularly, like the Marina Del Bay oil well accident in January 2019.

Orange County has long been associated with oil production. In the early 1920s, the discovery of oil led to a financial boom. By the 1940s, oil derricks were lined up on the sands of Huntington Beach. "Today it is totally unimaginable how close these derricks are stuck together on the beach. But this was commonplace at the time," Nagami said.

For the past few decades, the wells in Huntington Beach have been closed. The plunge in oil prices, rising real estate prices, and increasing emphasis on tourism in the 1980s transformed Huntington Beach from an oil city to a surf city. After the oil spill by American traders in 1990, environmental organizations and the city government pushed Chevron to close some oil wells near the Pacific Coast Highway.

"The important point is that fossil fuels affect us and our environment in many ways. The list is endless," Nagami said.

He pointed out that emissions from oil drilling can have adverse effects on health, ranging from respiratory diseases to increased cancer risks. The oil spill is severely destructive not only to marine life but also to coastal communities.

"Unless we have real policy changes to ensure that this type of disaster does not happen again, it will happen again," Nagami said.

Southern California is changing, but it's hard to say what it will look like. Tom Ford, chief executive of the Gulf Foundation, pointed out that oil is deeply entrenched in Southern California. "We have a long history of oil processing, transportation, and infrastructure," said Ford, who worked for the Oil Spill Prevention and Response Office of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for 10 years. He pointed out that the existing uses of our coasts, such as oil infrastructure, are sometimes inconsistent with recreational and commercial uses (such as fishing).

"Don't sound too greasy, but you don't want your seafood to contain oil. This is a decision that the public must make, and the leak does make this the focus," he said.

Trying to prevent the leak from happening again is not as simple as banning oil production. Big Oil is an important part of Southern California's history and infrastructure. In some cases, offshore oil platforms can help endangered marine life, because drilling platforms sometimes act as huge artificial reefs.

For Ford and other environmentalists, it is hoped that public pressure and policy changes can transform offshore oil platforms and pipelines into more environmentally friendly initiatives, such as wind farms or wave power plants, which are economically beneficial and help create a Artificial structure of marine safe harbor. Life-just like some current oil platforms.

"The question is: Can we build a new generation of infrastructure along the coast that not only provides clean energy, but can also improve the ocean structure to create more fish and fisheries?" Ford said.

Change is happening, albeit slowly, partly because of oil spills, as happened in Orange County.

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