Santa Barbara County District Attorney Joyce Dudley is sure keeping environmental polluters in check! She’s saving the world, one working man at a time by throwing the book at people who drive too fast on Highway 166.
Everyone, be wary!
Actually, Dudley’s only got her eagle eyes on one guy—the driver of a tanker truck that took a curve at the wrong speed, spilling thousands of gallons of oil into the Cuyama River in 2020.
A press release from the District Attorney’s Office said the driver “drove at an unsafe speed and made an unlawful turning movement.” It could have been any truck. It could have been any driver. But I think the key to this case is one big, scary word: oil.
Ooh. I shudder!
A quick check of accident records along that infamously dangerous stretch of road yields “216 large truck collisions requiring a police response between 2015 and 2020,” according to California Highway Patrol stats analyzed by the Center for Biological Diversity.
It could have been 1,000 gallons of molasses or a dump truck load of dust and gravel. Both spilled on the same stretch of Highway 101 in Santa Rosa last year, hours apart from one another, according to Burns & Wilcox, an insurance company.
It could have been thousands of rolls of toilet paper, a pre-pandemic accident that happened in Canada on Highway 401. Imagine all the toilet paper hoarders fighting over that one? Would have been cleaned up in seconds, amirite?!
It could have been 42,000 pounds of pig parts, which flipped over on Highway 59 in Texas. That’s actually really disgusting.
It, literally, could have been any truck that carries any load of any product that started to sway as it headed into that fateful curve along Highway 166 that day, eventually dumping its load into the river.
Would Dudley have prosecuted? What if that molasses spill killed a mallard and a belted kingfisher? Or toilet paper got stuck inside their bellies? Would the Fish and Game Code violations have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law? I doubt it! Not sexy enough.
Oil, bad. Molasses, kind of sweet. Toilet paper, so fresh and so clean.
The District Attorney’s Office is charging the oil tanker driver with the deaths of those birds, which aren’t even endangered species.
I have yet to see one single charge against the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for killing hundreds of endangered steelhead in the Santa Ynez River during the drought because the massive federal department couldn’t keep its water pumps working in Cachuma Lake.
So what’s up, Dudley? Is this a political tactic, targeting a truck driver simply because the contents of his tanker were full of crude oil? Or are you setting a precedent for what we should expect in the future after accidents on Highway 166?
Even the Center for Biological Diversity, a staunchly anti-oil environmental advocacy organization, believes that this case isn’t going to fix the issue. While the center is very concerned about oil—and is definitely going to use the crash as fuel (pun intended) for its fight against ExxonMobil oil trucks driving coastal highways—the sheer number of accidents on that stretch of highway is a reminder that something needs to be fixed.
And it’s not the driver.
It’s the road.
The Canary is very happy to fly. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 25 – Apr 1, 2021.
