Environment & The Green Beat

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5 / KCBS / AP / BCN) ― Members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, demanded answers Monday on the U.S. Coast Guard's response to an oil spill that dumped 58,000 gallons of toxic fuel into San Francisco Bay -- but the lawmakers left unsatisfied and pledged to open another federal investigation.

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A high-ranking admiral countered that the blame for the Bay Area's worst oil spill in nearly two decades rested squarely with the operators of the container ship that rammed a tower of San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Nov. 7.

"Something tragic must have taken place on board the ship," Coast Guard Rear Adm. Craig Bone said. If the pilot and master "had carried out their responsibilities, we wouldn't be sitting here today."

The collision opened a gash in the vessel's hull, leaking the fuel that spread inside and outside the Golden Gate, contaminating miles of coastline and killing hundreds of birds.

As of Monday, the number of oiled birds found dead or that died after being taken to rescue centers neared 1,400 as the total number of birds blackened by the spill topped 2,000.

While numerous Bay Area beach fronts reopened over the weekend, more than a dozen beaches and piers still remained closed Monday while cleanup crews continued to worked at recovering oil.

In a three-hour congressional field hearing at San Francisco's Presidio, within sight of the Bay, 10 lawmakers took turns grilling Adm. Bone about why the service did not do more to warn the Cosco Busan it was in trouble, why it waited hours to inform city officials of the spill, and why it did not press fishermen and volunteers into service sooner.

Congressman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the chairman of the subcommittee that convened the hearing, said the Coast Guard's responses left him wanting.

"Something is missing," Cummings said. "We've got to find out what it is that is missing. It's not just about San Francisco. This is about our country, and this is about making sure this type of thing doesn't happen again."

The Coast Guard said Monday it was initiating a nationwide "incident-specific preparedness review" to ensure its personnel in other regions would be ready for such a disaster.

"I'm mystified by Admiral Bone's answers as to why they did not inform the city," Speaker Pelosi, who represents San Francisco, told reporters after the hearing. "Once it had happened, the fact that they did not share that information is something they're just going to have to account for."
 
Pelosi said she planned to ask the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, Richard Skinner, to conduct his own investigation. That would be in addition to ongoing probes by the U.S. Attorney's Office, the National Transportation Safety Board, California government agencies and Cummings' House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation.

That the NTSB investigation could take a year or more "is just too long," Pelosi said. "Especially since this could happen again."

"Accidents do happen," Pelosi continued, "but the fact that all that time could go by, all that opportunity lost, is something I do not understand. We need the answers, and we need them very, very soon."

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom told the lawmakers that the first hint the city got of a major problem was when a part-time fire boat operator radioed that "something was going on" about 12 hours after the collision. The Coast Guard never informed the city, which could have mobilized forces including volunteers, he said.

"Notification was lax," he said. "In fact, arguably, there was no notification, even of 140 gallons of oil being spilled."

"Although the City continued to register our concerns about the need for local involvement, it was not until Saturday that (Coast Guard) Unified Command began to actively incorporate city officials into the disaster response," Newsom added.

"Our local and regional expertise and emergency response structure should play a crucial role from the beginning of any disaster," Newsom said.

Bone acknowledged that the Coast Guard was too slow to inform city officials. There "was a mistake in the communication," but he said the service was determined to improve.

"We'll do whatever we can to make sure it never happens again. We can do better...and we will do better," Bone said. "We're not going to wait, we're going to move forward."

Newsom also told the subcommittee that federal authorities turned away thousands of beach cleanup and wildlife rescue volunteers "because there was no effective volunteer management plan."

Bone admitted his agency was caught off-guard by the number of citizen volunteers wanting to aid cleanup efforts and said national response plans for disasters may need review.

"In a post 9/11 environment, we have to have better coordination, better use of volunteers," Bone said.

But the admiral conceded little else, pointing instead to human error aboard the Cosco Busan.

The pilot, Capt. John Cota, has told NTSB investigators there were indications of problems with his two radars and his grasp of electronic charts before the ship left its berth. But Bone said the pilot reported no such problems to the Coast Guard's Vessel Traffic Service that morning.

"If a pilot tells someone that his radar doesn't work, then gets under way, then he basically puts himself in a position where he's already placed the vessel at risk on his own accord," Bonetold reporters afterward.

Bone also pushed back against criticism that the VTS should have done more to warn the Cosco Busan it might be in trouble. The VTS had asked Cota his intentions less than two minutes before the collision, but had gone silent after that, the NTSB reported.

VTS personnel are specifically trained "not to distract the pilot with interruptions during any critical maneuver," Bone told lawmakers.

Yet he and Cummings both said that lawmakers should study whether the VTS should be empowered to take a more active role in directing ship traffic.

Bone seemed surprised that anyone could possibly collide with a bridge tower.

The opening that Cota was shooting for beneath the bridge "is one of the easiest spans to pass through because it's over 2,000 feet wide," Bone said. The collision marked the first time in Coast Guard records that an ocean-going ship had struck a bridge tower, he said.

Bone also said the cleanup was "one of the most successful cleanups that I've ever seen." More than 19,000 gallons of the toxic bunker fuel have been recovered, the joint command overseeing the response reported Monday.  

However, some environmentalists have challeneged the accuracy of those oil recovery figures, suggesting the amount of oil collected is actually much less.

"As oil spills go, five to 20 percent is what you see" typically recovered, Bone said.

Congressman George Miller responded that if a 20 percent recovery rate is good, a new emphasis must be placed on prevention.

"That's just not going to work," Miller said.

Officials said a spill like the one in San Francisco Bay was avoided in a similar accident in the harbor of Portland, Maine five years ago because of a different bridge fender design. In that incident, a tanker carrying more than 11 million gallons of bunker fuel crashed into a pillar supporting the Casco Bay Bridge. Transportation officials said the design of the fender deflected the blow of the ship, and didn't tear it open.
 
The fender system around Portland's bridge has plastic tubing and rubber pads to absorb energy if it's hit. However, California Dept. of Transportation officials said that kind of fender would not work in San Francisco Bay because it would take up too much room.

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