California agency helps with gulf oil cleanup
Andrew S. Ross
San Francisco Chronicle
06/17/2010
When the Dubai Star spilled 400 gallons of bunker fuel into the San Francisco Bay in October, the Office of Spill Prevention and Response got right on it, as it does with every spill in California, from the Cosco Busan's 53,000 gallons off the Bay Bridge in 2007, to the 3,000 gallons dumped by an overturned tanker truck east of Donner Summit last month.
Currently, 17 staff members of the state agency, a division of the Department of Fish and Game, are helping out in the Gulf of Mexico.
Five of them are Coast Guard reservists, including the office's Deputy Administrator Scott Schaefer, who got called for duty to help out on the cleanup. Schaefer is captaining a Coast Guard vessel off the Mobile, Ala., coast.
The rest include "geographic information systems" experts, who are up in planes over the gulf with high-tech cameras, measuring spill areas and the varying thicknesses of the oil below. Others are scattered across the beaches, tending to affected wildlife and working with local shoreline cleanup-assessment teams. The Sacramento office has sent over advice on training and coordinating volunteer teams in Florida.
"We're helping based on what the needs are," said spokeswoman Alexia Retallack. "If we can help, even with information, we're happy to do it."
The agency, with approximately 300 employees, is responsible for investigating and overseeing the cleanup of spills and for ensuring that any facility dealing with oil has a workable spill-preparation plan - a determination often made by unannounced drills conducted by agency employees.
Created in 1991, the Office of Spill Prevention and Response was set up after the 1989 ExxonValdez spill and the 1990 American Trader spill, which left 400,000 gallons of BP oil soiling the shores of Huntington Beach, killing an estimated 4,000 birds.
It is also a member of the Pacific States-British Columbia Oil Spill Task Force, consisting of agencies from Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii and British Columbia.
The West Coast is "just much bigger and better funded" in terms of preparedness, Schaefer told the New York Times.
Fortunately, his agency, budgeted at approximately $35 million a year, is not subject to the vagaries of state finances. It's funded by a tax on all oil imported into California.
There's a ton more information on the agency, including its oil spill contingency plans for the Bay Area and elsewhere in California, at www.dfg.ca.gov/ospr.
Be more prepared: Good timing for a preventive measure that San Rafael Assemblyman Jared Huffman has been carrying for several months.
His bill, AB234, would require ships transferring oil to another vessel in California waters - like the Dubai Star last year - to deploy a boom before and during the operation, not merely afterward, as current law allows. There have been 13 vessel-to-vessel oil spills off the California coast over the past two years, according to Huffman's office.
The bill is scheduled for a vote in the state Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water on Tuesday.
Sunny side up: Also nicely timed is SolarDay 2010, which is Saturday.
The San Francisco-originated event is "an annual day of recognition for solar energy and the goals of energy independence, sustainable energy and protection of our planet."
