Response to fuel spill under Bay Bridge called 'unusually slow'
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By Jonathan Curiel, Kevin Fagan, Peter Fimrite,Pat Yollin, Chronicle Staff Writers
Friday, November 9, 2007
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(11-08) 22:14 PST San Francisco --
Emergency officials were pressured Thursday to explain why it took them hours to announce that 58,000 gallons of oil had leaked from a container ship that rammed the Bay Bridge on Wednesday - creating a slick that has contaminated beaches and injured hundreds of birds from Hunters Point to the Marin Headlands and out to the Farallon Islands.
San Francisco officials, frustrated that they weren't told immediately about the severity of the spill, threatened legal action against the company or agency responsible for the disaster. Sen. Barbara Boxer has called for scrutiny of the Coast Guard's response. Residents and environmental groups have become increasingly alarmed at the sprawling contamination - and what they called an anemic cleanup response taking place as late as Thursday night.
"Why did it take them so long to respond?" complained Mike Herz, founder of the San Francisco Baykeeper organization and chairman of U.S. Friends of the Earth. "Every oil spill I've ever seen has screwups of one kind or another.
"But it looks like they've been unusually slow in responding in this one."
All through the day, the heavy fuel oil that spilled from the container ship Cosco Busan washed up on beaches along the San Francisco and Marin coastlines, leaving purplish sheens on the water and black blobs in the sand. Hundreds of birds coated in thick, gloppy oil were injured or dead.
"It's just heartbreaking," said Sally McFadden, 49-year-old birdwatcher from Larkspur who went to Kirby Cove in the Marin Headlands to help and was shocked when she saw the oil-slathered rocks and sand.
About 9,500 gallons of oil had been contained by Thursday evening, U.S. Coast Guard Capt. William Uberti said. But as he spoke, questions were swirling about his agency's response and whether it could have been quicker.
Oil began leaking into the water after the 65,131-ton, 810-foot-long ship crashed into the base of a tower of the Bay Bridge's western span in heavy fog at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. Within an hour, six emergency vessels from the Coast Guard and Marine Spill Response Corp. were on the scene, Uberti said. Yet up until 4 p.m., officials apparently believed only 140 gallons of oil had leaked into the water.
They then learned that the actual amount of the spill was a much more alarming 58,000 gallons, Uberti said. That news was not announced to the public and some local officials until 9 p.m.
"We were kind of busy. ... We were busy figuring this stuff out," Uberti said when asked about the delay.
Democrat Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said in a statement that she was "very troubled by the Coast Guard's delay in delivering accurate information to the public and the city of San Francisco. ... Many questions remain as to why it took an entire day to determine the gravity of this spill."
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom promised that the city would take legal action against whoever is responsible for the spill and expressed irritation that his office, like many, learned the true scope of the spill after 9 p.m.
"I'm not saying anyone lied. I'm saying there was wrong information," Newsom said. "It all goes to intent. Was there intent to mislead? That needs to be assessed. There's a lot of finger-pointing right now. ... I'm just concerned about mitigating the damage and cleaning it up and then holding those people responsible."
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is scheduled to visit Fort Mason Friday and get a briefing on the crisis.
The crash was the first time an oceangoing ship had run into the bridge. The structure did not sustain major damage, but the wildlife in the area is in trouble for at least weeks to come.
"It's very discouraging, and it's bad. Birds come here to feed because it's a very rich, a very diverse region," said Jay Holcomb, director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Fairfield, the rehabilitation center that eventually will receive all of the recovered oiled birds.
"We know oil spills are horrible. The animals are frightened. We catch what we can. We do the best we can, but we're limited in what we do. It's just sad to see this."
The last big spill in the bay was in 1996, when a valve broke on the ship Cape Mohican at San Francisco's southeastern waterfront and dumped 40,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil. About 4,000 birds were slimed by oil, and 500 died. The environmental damage took at least two years to repair.
Coast Guard officials said 16 beaches have been closed to the public since the spill Wednesday because of contamination: Angel Island, Crissy Field, Kirby Cove, Black Sand Beach, Rodeo Beach, Fort Point, Muir Beach, Fort Baker and China Beach, Tennessee Valley, Keller Beach, Point Isabel, Ferry Point, Cesar Chavez Beach, Middle Harbor and Shimada Park.
The Coast Guard reported Thursday evening that 200 emergency workers were attacking the disaster inside the bay with eight skimmers - boats equipped with machines that suck the oil up from the water. Outside the bay, three skimmers were at work. The agency also conducted two air flights to assess the damage.
But many on the water who encountered untended oil slicks both Wednesday afternoon and Thursday wondered where all the cleanup crews were. It was evident by late afternoon that not all parts of the bay were being cleaned up.
Among the handful of obvious slicks in the water Thursday evening was a swath the size of a football field west of the Berkeley flats between Angel Island and the Berkeley Marina. No cleanup crews were around, and Coast Guard officials who cruised past it in their ship reasoned that recovery teams were focused on spill areas that more immediately threatened the shore and wildlife.
"We are concentrating our efforts where we think we can make the most impact ... and it's where the oil is more concentrated," Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Anya Hunter said.
The most urgent of those places, she said, was Point Bonita, 2 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. Workers spread a 200-yard-long boom to block oil from reaching the shoreline there.
But environmental groups such as the Baykeeper, Sierra Club and Audubon California, along with sailors on the bay, urged that more be done.
Gary York, a salmon fisherman from Fairfax, was out in his 17-foot whaler Wednesday when he ran into the oil slick that covered the bottom of his boat with a "tarry, gooey, black mess."
"At 4 p.m. Wednesday, I was coming in the Golden Gate, and there was a huge oil slick everywhere, the fumes were intense, and nobody was cleaning up anything," York recalled Thursday.
The crew of the container ship also came under scrutiny. Coast Guard investigators determined Thursday that nobody operating the vessel was intoxicated, but their probe was expected to stretch on for at least several days.
State Pilot Commission records show that Capt. John Cota, who was in charge of navigating the Cosco Busan when it hit the bridge, has been involved in a number of ship-handling incidents and was reprimanded last year for errors in judgment when he ran a ship aground near Antioch.
Cota, 59, is a master mariner, and veteran of 26 years as a ship pilot. He was involved in four "incidents" over the past 14 years and on several other occasions was "counseled" for perceived mistakes in ship handling.
The company that owns the Cosco Busan said it would make good on whatever responsibility it had in the disaster.
Darrell Wilson, a spokesman for MTI Network, a Stamford, Conn., a firm that handles crisis management for the shipping industry, said the ship's owner - Regal Stone Ltd. of Hong Kong - "is stepping up to the plate. It's their ship. They own it. It's fully insured."
Immediately after the spill, officials said, Regal Stone called in a private cleanup company, O'Brien's Group of Southern California, which then dispatched Marine Spill Response Corp. and the National Response Center.
Barry McFarland, incident commander with O'Brien's, could not say how long the cleanup effort would take.
"It's too early to tell any timeline," he said. "We'll be here for quite some time."
Wildlife officials said finding birds and other animals covered in oil is as high a priority as containing the spill. By Thursday evening, dozens of had been recovered alive, and at least six were taken in dead. The number of affected animals is sure to rise to the hundreds, officials said.
The most common species feeding at the Golden Gate at this time of year are western grebes and scoters.
"The birds' first response is to get out of the water" after a spill, said Dr. Mike Ziccardi, director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network. "Because they're out of the water, they can't eat. They can become severely debilitated and can die unless brought into rehabilitation."
At Ocean Beach, bird rescuers picked along the sand among woodchip-sized globs of oil, looking for birds. The same search went on a few miles north at the Marin Headlands.
At Kirby Cove, the water shimmered with a purple sheen. Great blobs, some as big as footballs, clung to rocks and lay in the sand. At Rodeo Beach, birds flapped down onto shore, and as volunteers ran up to them they would flee to the water, only to be pounded back onto the beach by the surf.
"This is nothing," National Park Ranger Robert Del Secco, who was guarding Rodeo, said sadly. "What's around the corner at Point Bonita is worse."
Online resources
Read the most up-to-date reports from the Coast Guard:
www.uscgsanfrancisco.com
Bay oil spills
1937: The region's largest oil spill (more than 2.7 million gallons of fuel) happened when the steam tanker Frank H. Buck hit the President Coolidge in heavy fog.
January 1971: 800,000 gallons of oil spills into the bay after two Standard Oil Co. tankers collide.
November 1984: Tanker explodes, leaking as much as 200,000 gallons of oil near the Golden Gate.
April 1988: 432,000 gallons of oil leaks from a tank at Shell's Martinez refinery. The spill, which kills hundreds of birds and mammals, is attributed to a drain valve that was improperly left open. In 1989, Shell agrees to pay $20 million to settle claims.
Source: Chronicle research
Contributing to this report were Chronicle staff writers Carl Nolte, Rob Selna, Cecilia Vega, Jane Kay, Henry K. Lee, Michael Taylor and Michael Cabanatuan. E-mail the writers at jcuriel@sfchronicle.com, kfagan@sfchronicle.com and pfimrite@sfchronicle.com.
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