Environment & The Green Beat

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) ― The one-year anniversary of the Cosco Busan oil spill in San Francisco Bay is inspiring an evaluation of public and private resource networks that would be called upon should a similar environmental disaster occur in the future.

The spill occurred Nov. 7, 2007, when pilot John Cota steered the cargo ship Cosco Busan out of the Port of Oakland in heavy fog and crashed into a protective fender of the Bay Bridge, spilling about 54,000 gallons of heavy bunker fuel into Bay.

The environmental disaster and the shortfalls in responding to its containment and cleanup have prompted a wave of legislative and organizational changes meant to address gaps in preventing and responding to future spills.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a package of seven bills Sept. 29 aiming to improve marine and inland oil spill prevention and cleanup in California, most of them authored by Bay Area legislators in response to the Cosco Busan disaster.

Some provisions mandated by these bills include better training for first-responders, increased fines for polluters, increased oversight and accountability of the Board of California Pilot Commissioners, which is responsible for licensing ship pilots.

David Lewis, executive director of the marine environmental group Save the Bay, believes the new legislation was successful in addressing some gaps in oil spill response preparation, but that it did not do enough to address prevention.

"Once there's a spill, even the best preparation can only capture a fraction of it," Lewis said.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, has authored a bill currently pending in the Senate that would require cargo ships traveling to U.S. ports to have double-hulled fuel tanks.

"If that had been in place, the Cosco Busan might not have ruptured," Lewis said.

The Harbor Safety Committee of the San Francisco Bay Region, which oversees the safe movement of cargo and barge traffic through the Bay, has implemented some preventative measures as a result of last year's oil spill, according to Lewis.

The committee lowered cargo ship speed limits in foggy conditions, and ships in port when visibility is less than one-half mile are no longer allowed to disembark, Lewis said.

The Cosco Busan reportedly disembarked when visibility was less than one-quarter mile.

Sejal Choksi, program director of the pollution watchdog Baykeeper, agrees that prevention measures are important, but steers Baykeeper's efforts to response and cleanup efforts.

"Human error was what caused the oil spill and you can't always prepare for that," Choksi said.

Baykeeper participated in an independent review initiated by the U.S. Coast Guard that resulted in 200 recommendations for state and local agencies in the event of an oil spill.

"It was the first time the Coast Guard decided that an oil spill warranted an independent review," Choksi said.

The short-and long-term recommendations resulting from the review have yet to be implemented Choksi said.

Rbecca Dmytryk of WildRescue will be teaching a workshop at the Shorebird Nature Center on Saturday to train more people to safely approach and capture wildlife after an oil spill.

Working on the beaches after the Cosco Busan disaster, Dmytryk said the scene was horrifying, but that changes in oil spill response organization are slowly taking place.

"We're getting there," she said. "The tragedy and the unfortunate lessons we learned will help us be better prepared in the future."

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