Nov 9, 2007

Oil slick spreads across Bay

Owner of ship that hit Bay Bridge 'regrets incident'

By Erik N. Nelson, Paul Rogers and Mary Anne Ostrom / MediaNews

From Point Bonita in the Pacific to the Port of Oakland, a flotilla of cleanup ships spread out across the Bay on Thursday chasing 58,000 gallons of oil spilled by the ship that struck the Bay Bridge.

Meanwhile, Coast Guard officials defended the response to the spill - even after their initial reports Wednesday indicated only about 150 gallons of fuel had been spilled.

Wildlife authorities also combed area beaches, mostly on a hard-hit swath between Richmond and the mouth of the Bay, to rescue as many as 100 oil-soaked waterfowl.

Tides carried a plume of heavy fuel beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Pacific Ocean. By Thursday afternoon, oil had been sighted as far north as Stinson Beach, about 15 miles north of the city, and at least 16 beaches throughout the Bay Area - including those in Alameda and Oakland - were closed.

Officials had cleaned up 9,500 gallons of the marine bunker oil as of Thursday afternoon, in the wake of their delay in revealing to the public the true severity of the release.

Cleanup crews deployed 1,800 feet of floating oil-absorbing booms to contain the oil and protect environmentally sensitive or public areas.

Coast Guard officials said they knew within an hour the original report was too small, but couldn't get a full handle on the size of the spill until late afternoon.

Still, they waited at least five hours to divulge that 58,000 gallons had spilled.

Environmentalists and San Francisco city officials berated the agency for not providing timely information and promised to examine what happened.

Mayor Gavin Newsom said the city was considering filing a lawsuit against the shipping company and perhaps federal agencies.

"We would have responded differently if we had accurate information from the get-go," Newsom spokesman Nathan Ballard told The Associated Press. City workers, for instance, would have initially laid more boom lines to contain the oil, he said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to visit the spill command center at Fort Mason today for a briefing, and state Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, announced a senate committee would hold a hearing into the causes and the response to the spill in San Francisco on Nov. 19.

"We take this spill very seriously and we will do everything we can to protect and preserve the beauty of California's landmark estuary," Schwarzenegger said Thursday.

The Coast Guard also was unprepared to explain the whereabouts of the vessel's pilot, John Cota.

He had left the container ship before official investigators arrived. At first Coast Guard officials told reporters Thursday they were not able to take drug and alcohol samples from the pilot or interview him until he appeared at their request Thursday morning, 26 hours after the incident.

They later clarified such tests were performed within a few hours and that the alcohol test results were negative. Drug test results won't be available for days.

By Thursday evening, ribbons of oil were reported as far south as Hunters Point, east to Oakland up through Raccoon Straits to Richmond, along the San Francisco waterfront, several miles outside the Golden Gate Bridge, from south of San Francisco's Ocean Beach to Marin County's Stinson Beach in the north. Marin beaches just north of the Golden Gate appeared to experience the thickest concentration of oil.

"We mobilized as if it was a big spill right away," said U.S. Coast Guard Capt. William Uberti, in spite of an initial estimate, provided by the captain of the Cosco Busan, that the vessel was only missing 140 gallons of bunker fuel oil.

The ship collided with the Bay Bridge at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, doing no damage to the concrete abutment, but mangling its plastic bumper. The collision left a horizontal gash near the front of the ship, measuring 100 feet long, 12 feet wide and 3 feet deep.

Two of the ship's fuel tanks ruptured, and most of the fuel poured out in only 20 to 30 minutes, Uberti said.

The cleanup effort was hampered by bad weather - a fog that limited authorities' attempts to assess the spill, and tides that alternately pulled the oil toward the ocean and pushed it farther into the Bay.

About 200 people from at least 13 federal, state and local maritime, environmental and safety agencies worked on land and water Thursday, and another 100 were to join the effort today, said Barry McFarland, incident commander for the O'Brien's Group, a Brea-based disaster management firm hired to deal with the incident.

While oil sightings came in Wednesday from various locations along San Francisco's waterfront, it wasn't until Thursday morning, when fog lifted and authorities were able to see the oil from the air, that the extent of the contamination could be gauged.

The U.S. Coast Guard deployed 10 vessels equipped with cleanup gear, seven inside the Bay and three in the Pacific.

Their ability to pick up the drifting oil was limited by the thin concentration in most areas, which make skimming difficult, said Coast Guard spokeswoman Mariana O'Leary.

Most of the 9,500 gallons of oil picked up between Wednesday and Thursday was collected where the substance was the thickest. That heavy concentration covered an area from Raccoon Straits, between Tiburon and Angel Island, to Brooks Island, just off Richmond.

Meanwhile, journalists and officials dealing with the spill also had to sort through who, exactly, might be responsible for the spill.

Darrell Wilson, an Oklahoma-based public relations person, showed up at the waterside command center announcing that the ship's owner, Hong Kong-based Regal Stone Ltd., had hired him to speak for them.

He expressed regret on behalf of the firm as well as relief that no one had been injured, and said the ship had been leased by South Korean Hanjin Shipping.

A representative of Hanjin, however, said in a phone call from Korea that her firm had chartered the vessel from Synergy Maritime, a Cyprus-based firm that employs its crew. She declined to make a formal statement, other than to disavow earlier reports that Hanjin owned the vessel.



Impact on the Bay

The environmental impact of the spill continued to spread Thursday.

Tar balls the size of golf balls had been spotted in the water outside the Golden Gate, with smaller tar balls spotted in the bay.

The state Department of Fish and Game reported that 26 live oiled birds had been recovered and at least six had been found dead. The count of dead birds could easily reach into the hundreds in the coming days, wildlife experts said.

There are no reports yet of mammals suffering from affects of the spill, according to the Marine Mammal Center, whose offices are at Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands.

While the spill isn't very large, it's still a "lot of oil for San Francisco, for California. This is a very environmentally sensitive area, so that's of great concern," Uberti said.

Sejal Choksi, a spokeswoman for Baykeeper, a group that fights water pollution in the bay, said it didn't appear the Coast Guard moved as quickly as it could have.

"The Coast Guard doesn't seem to have boomed it off immediately enough because the spread of the oil has been great," Choksi said.

"It is really tragic," she added. "I'm not sure how it is going to get adequately cleaned up. We are going to see the impacts for quite some time."

Terry Picon was walking her dog Thursday at Crissy Field, a regular haunt for her and her black standard poodle JB.

"I was just out there yesterday, looking at the sea lions and saying what a beautiful place," Picon said. "Then I heard on the news about the oil spill. It's awful. You don't expect it to happen in your own back yard. Sure sounds like somebody was asleep at the wheel."