Finally we got our chance to remove ourselves from in front of computers, green festivals, and green buildings to volunteer for the recent Cosco-Busan Oil Spill. Granted this last training session will allow us to take part as official Disaster Service Worker Volunteers but at this point the San Francisco city officials have or will soon re-open the local beaches.

Some Greenerati members, along with 300 some odd volunteers sat through a well organized session that included educational, safety and informational elements. Although the training did offer lots of interesting info, it certainly could have been condensed into a session about one-half as long. City officials + training equals a long, repetitive session.

Various leaders from the city public works department, parks and wildlife, and various other official types conducted the training. They discussed, among other things, the various elements of the IFO-380 that spilled into San Francisco Bay about 10 days ago. They made a point of declaring that it is not a question of is the oil toxic but rather how toxic is it. How little did we know about the Liquid Density, Vapor Pressure and Flash Point of this oil. The crowd enjoyed the show and tell fashion show of how to get into and get out of the Ghostbusters-looking Tyvek suit, gloves and booties used by volunteers to clean up the oil. We hope that the oil doesn’t cause any more damage but if it does then we’re just itching to jump into our white hazmat suits and do some clean-up.