Coast Guard failed to warn ship's pilot about hitting the Bay Bridge, investigators say

Demian Bulwa, Kevin Fagan
San Francisco Chronicle
11/15/2007

The Coast Guard did not warn the Cosco Busan that it was about to sideswipe the base of a Bay Bridge tower last week, even after the freighter appeared to be seriously off course, investigators said today.

The National Transportation and Safety Board reported that in the moments before the collision on Nov. 7, operators at the Coast Guard's Vessel Traffic Service asked pilot John Cota where he was heading because the ship seemed to be straying from a course under the the bridge.

In fact, the pilot's bearing was so wrong that traffic monitors thought he intended to stop the ship south of the bridge.

Cota radioed back that he indeed intended to pilot the ship under the bridge, and the service operators decided to leave him alone as he negotiated the delicate task, investigators said.

That maneuver went disastrously wrong when the ship scraped the bridge, creating a hole in the hull that allowed 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel to dump into the bay. The spill soon spread, and in the days to come it fouled dozens of miles of lagoons, beaches and oceanfront throughout the region, killing hundreds of birds and infuriating citizens and politicians from the Bay Area to Washington, D.C.

The traffic operators' stated reason for not warning Cota in the seconds before he hit the bridge was that they wanted to give him two minutes of radio silence so he could drive unhindered, safety board officials said. Whether that was wise or not is a judgment that will require further examination, they said.

"That certainly will be part of our investigation," board spokesman Peter Knudson said today.

Cota's attorney said the bar pilot continues to maintain that the ship's radar equipment was faulty as he approached the bridge, even though safety board investigators and the Coast Guard contend that the ship's navigational equipment was functional.

"The closer we came to the bridge, the more the picture on both radars deteriorated," Cota said in a statement released by lawyer John Meadows. "The radar presentation, in fact, deteriorated to such an extent that the raycon at the center of the bridge was not showing on all of the radars, nor were the towers, the bridge piers and the buoys which indicated the towers. All I could get was a distortion of the bridge - a thick black ribbon without any details."

Meanwhile, as the spill aftermath entered its second week, state and federal lawmakers turned the screws tighter on the Coast Guard and other agencies involved in the incident and the oil cleanup, saying there perhaps need to be tighter restrictions on vessel traffic in the bay, and a way to speed up response to spill disasters.

And commercial fishermen filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court, saying their losses could rise above $100 million as their boats remain idled because fish in the bay face contamination from the spilled oil.

Among those most angry over the response to the spill were city officials in Berkeley, who said that the Coast Guard and state Department of Fish and Game, the agencies with primary responsibility in the crisis, issued advisories for people to stay out of the water in San Francisco and Marin counties - but issued no such warnings in Berkeley.

Berkeley's waterfront was so fouled that on Sunday, City Manager Phil Kamlarz signed an emergency proclamation restricting access to the water.

State Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, took on the issue at an emergency oversight hearing in Emeryville today, saying she will examine state law to determine whether it was properly followed in the spill response - and just as important, whether it is adequate to the needs of the bay.

She said disaster officials told Berkeley leaders in the crucial early hours of the spill that "we weren't high enough on the priority list."

Among the issues being looked at today in the hearing will be the long-term effects on the environment and wildlife, as well as the feasibility of requiring large ships to be double-hulled.

"The bottom line is we want to prevent this from ever happening again," Hancock said.

The fishermen's suit, filed this morning in U.S. District Court, asks for compensation for their losses while they are restricted from fishing the oil-fouled water, and demands that the waterways be fully cleaned and safe again for fishing.

The suit names ship owner Regal Stone, Ltd., Hanjin Shipping Co., Ltd. and the China Ocean Shipping Co. (Cosco) as defendants.

"You're talking about thousands of boats and fishermen that are being affected," said William Audet, who filed the suit and handled suits following the notorious 1989 spill from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska.

"If you just stick to the commercial fishermen alone, I'd say the losses will be over $100 million. Add in the cleanup costs, the little tourist-boat fishermen, and a few other things, and you'll be well over $200 million."

He said those most affected by the spill right now may be the crab fishermen, but the herring season is also threatened.

"It's just going to grow," said Audet.