It’s Time for Accountability in Oil Spill : * Beyond a Settlement for the Huntington Beach Cleanup Are Lessons to Be Learned

It’s been nearly a year since Orange County residents looked on in horror and felt helpless as oil washed ashore from a spill at a terminal off Huntington Beach. The 400,000 gallons of crude that spewed from the American Trader and covered 15 miles of shoreline was the worst spill off California shores since the Santa Barbara accident in 1969.

The immediate psychological effect of the spill was to awaken in residents a new sense of the fragility of the shoreline in Orange County. Suddenly, the fabled surfing waters off Huntington Beach, symbol of a carefree California lifestyle for several generations who lived it or learned of it in song and film, seemed endangered. Although the beaches reopened and life resumed as normal, the moment of accounting in the legal system for that traumatic experience 11 months ago soon will be at hand.

Accountability for immediate environmental damage and for associated damage to quality of life--as represented in lost tourism and tax dollars, and in the closure of beaches and harbors--is at issue in a huge lawsuit that was filed Jan. 4 by former California Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp in Orange County Superior Court. The plaintiffs represent a broad coalition of state agencies, the cities of Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, the Orange County district attorney and other county officials.

The lawsuit raises broad questions of responsibility. Two defendants, BP America and Golden West Refining, have already indicated a willingness to settle to avoid lengthy litigation.

Damages as subtle as a perceived harm to the reputation of the county and its beaches may be difficult to assess. But surely such tangible expenditures as the $325,000 in county funds spent on the cleanup ought to be easy enough to resolve.

Let there be lasting lessons beyond any legal settlement. “How fragile we are,” the rock singer Sting has written. How fragile is our shoreline; how great our responsibility to protect it.