[NYTr] Grand jury to investigate SF Bay oil spill

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Steven L. Robinson - activ-l

San Francisco Chronicle - Monday, November 12, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/12/BAO2TB3AV.DTL

Ship's crew ordered to appear before grand jury investigating bay oil
spill

by Kevin Fagan & Demian Bulwa, Staff Writers

San Francisco - -- The cleanup of the San Francisco Bay oil spill moved
Monday into what is expected to be a weeks-long mopping of rocks,
beaches and birds, while emergency officials began assessing how the
mess was allowed to happen.

The greatest scrutiny centers on the crew of the Cosco Busan - the
container ship that rammed the base of a Bay Bridge tower Wednesday
morning and dumped 58,000 gallons of heavy fuel into the bay - and on
the Coast Guard and the company that is conducting the cleanup.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney's office is investigating whether any
criminal laws were broken in the spill, either by the crew or anyone
else, and members of the ship's crew have received subpoenas to appear
before a federal grand jury. Dumping toxic oil into U.S. waters is
potentially both a civil and a criminal violation.

"The fact of the matter this event should have never occurred," said
Adm. Thad Allen, commandant of the Coast Guard. "This is a prevention
issue as much as anything else."

Allen told The Chronicle on Monday in a meeting with its editorial board
that he believes now that his agency's response was appropriate for the
size of the spill, but said a full assessment remains to done.

The need for that and other assessments - as well as for significant
improvements to the area's disaster readiness - was reiterated by San
Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, and others
who met at Crissy Field Monday to discuss the crisis with the guard and
other cleanup managers.

"We have a lot of questions that need to be answered," said Woolsey.
"How did this happen? Why was the size of the spill underestimated and
underreported? Why did it take so long for the local governments to know
what was happening and what they needed to do?

"....But most importantly, the question we must ask is, 'Are we doing
everything possible right now to clean it up?'"

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the gathering, underscored the
urgency of notifying everyone in the area more quickly next time there
is a big oil disaster, rather than more than four hours after the Coast
Guard determined that the spill was far greater than the original
report of about 140 gallons.

"The concern that I have is represented by that children's toy right
there on the beach," Pelosi said to Coast Guard Adm. Craig Bone while
standing on a bridge over the Crissy Field lagoon and pointing at a red
and blue plastic shovel in the sand.

"In no case was the public informed that it was not a safe place to be,
and that's what concerns me."

Bone told Pelosi there was no excuse for the delay.

"We'll find out exactly what happened and how to correct it," he said
later.

He and the commandant said they take the urgency of notification as
personally as Pelosi.

"Whatever the issues are here, they are of omission, not commission,"
Allen said. "Unlike other sectors of the military that are deployed
overseas, we are deployed right here in our own community. We are
affected by events such as this just as much as everyone, and we care
very deeply."

At the editorial board meeting with The Chronicle, Allen and his staff
at the meeting were not sure how many boats were on the scene in the
crucial few hours after the 8:30 a.m. ship crash, where and when
containment booms were deployed, or why more local resources weren't
brought into the cleanup effort quickly.

Such questions will loom large in the coming examinations by the guard
itself and the National Transportation Safety Board, which Allen called
in this weekend to assess the incident.

Not having the information on hand in itself didn't necessarily mean
mistakes were made - and Allen said he remained confident that his
agency followed the Area Contingency Plan for oil spills, a plan
crafted two years ago by state, federal and local agencies to
coordinate mutual response.

"The response was mounted as soon as we knew there was oil in the
water, and it went on throughout the entire day," the commandant said.

Reports from the disaster command center last week asserted that five
"skimmer" boats - specially rigged craft to mop oil off the water -
were on the scene by 11 a.m. By then, all of the fuel had been in the
water for two and half hours, since all 58,000 gallons rushed out in a
half hour, disaster officials later determined.

However, it wasn't until 4:49 p.m. that the guard determined that
58,000 - not 140 gallons had spewed through the ship's hull. And that's
where the most immediately discernible mistake was made.

"By that time we had spent almost eight hours out there conducting oil
spill recovery operations, putting skimmers and boom in place," Allen
said. "And when we found out that it was much larger than the 140
gallons and failed to transmit that to local authorities, that was the
problem.

"But the response went exactly according to plan."

Among the elements of the crisis that will be gone over is the response
effort mounted by the O'Briens Group, which the ship owners immediately
contracted to conduct the cleanup. The company sent out the skimmers
and has hired crews that are cleaning up the beaches and rocks.

As of Monday, seven miles of containment boom had been deployed to
confine and collect oil in the water. About 1,000 people were working
on the crisis. More than 20 beaches from Pacifica to Point Reyes have
been fouled, and hundreds of oil-slimed birds have either died or
injured. Thousands of other birds are expected to die out in the ocean,
or otherwise unseen by rescue workers, environmental scientists
estimate.

Bone said the oil has diluted and spread so thinly that most of the
skimming on the water's surface is done, with the focus of cleanup now
on swabbing oil off rocks, birds and beaches.

One of the key problems with the incident appears to be on the bridge
of the ship, where early assessments of radio transmissions between the
Coast Guard and the ship operators seem to indicate there was a
communications problem of some kind. The Coast Guard informed the ship
that it was off course, but the operators disagreed - and then the
crash happened.

Human error, the fact that the ship operators failed in their efforts to
safely navigate the bay, Allen and Bone said, appears at this point to
have been key to the crash - not mechanical malfunction.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein echoed those sentiments after discussing the
crisis with emergency officials on Sunday. The criticized the response
overall, but said she is reserving full judgment until all the facts
are in.

That see-what-turns-up attitude is also being adopted by the NTSB, the
U.S. Attorney's Office and the guard itself as they proceed with their
own investigations. Hearings before in the state legislature and in
Congress have also been called for with the same aim in mind: What went
wrong, and how can preparedness be improved?

"To the extent that there is any issue associated with the response, I
intend to initiate a peer review group that will involve all the state
and local people that make up what we call the regional response team,"
Allen said. "We will do a complete top-to-bottom analysis, and any
lessons learned from that we will move forward and correct anything we
can in the future."

One of the key deficiencies in the Area Contingency Plan, a 6-inch-thick
document dating to 2005, appears to be a lack of adequate planning to
enlist volunteers and local governmental agencies in the response
effort. San Francisco on Friday offered a fire boat and 150 fire and
health department professionals trained to handle toxic oil, but the
command center rejected the offer for at least two days.

Bone said the rejection indicated a probable problem with the plan that
he intends to get to the bottom of. The issue of being able to use the
thousand-plus volunteers who offered help all over the Bay Area - but
weren't quickly put to work over the weekend, angering many - is
another he and his staff will be examining.

"If the plan is inadequate to the needs of this area, we may have to
change it," he said.

Newsom saw the disaster as an even larger statement on the weakness of
America's dependence on oil.

"We can do better than large oil tankers coming in and out of the bay
of San Francisco, and move to a more energy independent future," he
said at Crissy Field. "We'll continue to have these kinds of disasters
inevitably if we continue to have more tankers come in and out to feed
our addiction."

[Chronicle Staff Writer Zachary Coile and Jaxon Van Derbeken contributed
to this report.]