CG report: Responders ill-prepared for spill

Phillip Ewing
Navy Times
01/30/2008

The Coast Guardsmen who responded to the San Francisco Bay oil spill in November weren’t qualified to assess how much oil leaked from the freighter Cosco Busan after it hit the Bay Bridge, according to the Coast Guard’s first report into its response to the incident. What’s more, the ship’s crew vastly underestimated how much had been lost, and on top of it all, the English-speaking responders could barely communicate with the Chinese-speaking crew — they had to communicate using gestures and drawings.

That initial confusion, combined with delays in arranging boats to transport a California environmental expert to and from the Cosco Busan, was what caused the nine-hour delay in understanding that more than 50,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil had spilled into the bay, not the “0.4 metric tons” initially reported by the Cosco Busan’s chief engineer.

Unveiled Monday at the Coast Guard’s San Francisco Bay headquarters, the Incident Specific Preparedness Review report found that, once they began cleaning up the spill, local responders performed well. But the initial mix-up in assessing the quantity of oil on the water meant that tides had more time to broaden the oil slick.

A responder from the California Office of Spill Prevention and Response arrived at the regional command center at 9:45 a.m. Nov. 7 — an hour before the first Coast Guard team boarded the Cosco Busan — but he couldn’t get a boat out to the freighter until 12:05 p.m., according to the report. On arrival, he corrected the Coast Guardsmen’s earlier reports that only about 140 gallons had spilled, estimating instead that more than 58,000 gallons had leaked into the bay.

But while he finished his work at 2:30 p.m., the California spill official couldn’t get a boat back to the command center until 3, and then didn’t make his report to the unified command until 4. The news media weren’t notified until 9 that night.

The delays generated sharp criticism of the Coast Guard from local, state and federal lawmakers.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat who flew from Washington to see the spill and lambasted the Coast Guard’s response, said in a statement Monday that she found it “unacceptable that Coast Guard personnel were both unprepared to assess a disaster of this magnitude and ill-equipped to take advantage of the many resources at their disposal immediately following the disaster.”

Other critics, including California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, also pounced on the Coast Guard after the ISPR report’s release — in a statement she said it was “very troubling” that the Coast Guard responders had to use hand gestures and drawings to talk with the Cosco Busan’s Chinese crew. The ISPR report acknowledged things may have gone smoother if the Coast Guardsmen had brought aboard an interpreter.

Pelosi said she was also looking forward to the separate report she has requested from the Department of Homeland Security, now due April 1, to see how its probe compared with the Coast Guard’s version of events.

The Coast Guard report clarified many of the statistics associated with the incident. According to the most recent estimates, the Cosco Busan actually spilled 53,569 gallons of oil — a little less than initial reports — and about 36 percent of that was recovered within the first two weeks. At its peak, the government response included 41 ships and boats; 1,399 people; and a total of 38,200 feet of oil-skimming boom, the report says. The Coast Guard reports that 1,365 sea birds were killed by the oil, although California environmental groups have estimated the total could grow as time passes.

And although the report notes that there are fewer oil spills in the U.S. every year, that also means the lifesaving service has commensurately less experience in dealing with them: “If a large spill occurs every 10 years in one geographic area, the typical USCG responder would have less than a 30 percent chance of responding to a large spill in their typical three-year assignment to a sector command,” the authors wrote.

Moreover, the ISPR report contends that the media coverage and public perceptions of the incident were disproportionate to its severity — the spill “was not particularly large,” compared to a 1971 oil tanker collision in the bay that spilled more than 1.1 million gallons, or a 1984 tanker explosion outside the Golden Gate that spilled 1.5 million gallons. But because responders took so long to release information to reporters, and because the media “often uses information selectively,” the report says there was an impression that the Coast Guard and others were lollygagging instead of cleaning up the spill.

The second half of the ISPR investigation, into the latter part of the response, is due out in May.