Criminal probe of oil spill launched
COAST GUARD ADMITS DELAY IN SHARING INFORMATION
Article Launched: 11/12/2007 01:37:50 AM PST
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has launched a criminal probe into the cause of an oil spill that occurred after a cargo ship crashed into the Bay Bridge, killing wildlife, staining beaches and threatening the region’s Dungeness crab industry.
The nature of the probe remains undisclosed, but Coast Guard Capt. William Uberti told the Associated Press he notified federal investigators on Saturday about issues involving management and communication among members of the bridge crew: the helmsman, the watch officer, the ship’s master and the pilot.
Federal investigators were questioning crew members on board the ship, but they would be free to go afterward, Uberti said. “The normal procedure is to hold the crew for questioning so when (investigators) are done with them they can go,” Uberti said.
Uberti declined to specify what problems he reported to federal prosecutors. “It was just the way that everybody interacted” on the bridge, he said.
A call to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern California was not returned Sunday.
Darrell Wilson, a representative for Regal Stone Ltd., the Hong Kong-based company that owns the ship, the Cosco Busan, declined to comment Sunday on the investigation.
As a slew of investigators combed through the details of the accident, volunteers and more than 40 local, state and federal agencies worked Sunday to clean up the 58,000-gallon spill – the worst to hit the Bay Area in nearly two decades.
The head of the U.S. Coast Guard, in the Bay Area Sunday for a one-day visit, defended the Coast Guard’s response to the incident.
Commandant Adm. Thad Allen arrived in San Francisco from Washington, D.C., on Sunday afternoon, meeting with cleanup crews and state and local officials, and surveying from the air the damage caused after the cargo ship crashed into a Bay Bridge tower Wednesday morning.
“It’s clear that everyone understands the gravity of the situation,” Allen said.
Coast Guard officials have pinned the blame for the crash on human error, not mechanical failure, and the Coast Guard is working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office on the criminal investigation.
The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency that investigates major transportation accidents, arrived in San Francisco on Sunday to launch its own investigation. Debbie Hersman, an NTSB board member, said an investigation could take up to a year.
“Our focus here is going to be on the cause of this accident and what can be done to prevent an accident like this in the future,” she said.
Both Allen and Hersman said the crew was on its first voyage on the ship. The vessel changed ownership in October, Hersman said.
Coast Guard officials would not say whether they believe John Cota, the captain of the vessel at the time of the crash, or someone else was to blame for the spill.
Allen said “we need to establish the facts” before drawing conclusions.
Before an evening press conference, the Coast Guard said it would release audio communications from the vessel related to the incident but ended up deciding against doing so, citing its work with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and other agencies in responding to the incident.
But Allen said the audio would be available today and added, “There’s no desire to keep this information from anybody.”
He also fielded a question about the Coast Guard’s delay in getting information out Wednesday, when it was initially reported that just 140 gallons of oil had spilled.
The Coast Guard did not intentionally mislead anyone about the magnitude of what happened. He conceded, however, that the Coast Guard did not release information as quickly as it should have because it was busy responding to the disaster.
“It was an error of omission,” he said, “not an error of commission.”
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, also surveyed the scene Sunday. She said the system for responding to spills needed to be improved, especially communication between the Coast Guard and communities where toxic sludge began washing up on beaches shortly after the crash.
“There were a lot of unusual things such as weather, but that should not excuse this,” she said. “It’s clear that the cities around the bay should have been brought into this faster than they were.”
Allen said preliminary information suggests it took time to figure out the extent of the spill partly because sounding tubes used to measure how much fuel is in the oil tank were damaged in the crash.
To accurately measure the extent of a spill officials must measure how much fuel is in the tanks because it is difficult to get an accurate read just by looking at how much oil seems to be on the water, he said.
Allen also noted the poor visibility at the time, which he said was a quarter of a mile to an eighth of a mile.
“You don’t turn 900-foot vessels on a dime, and given the visibility at the time, I think it would be difficult to assess whether or not the bridge itself was visible,” he said, adding that would be part of the investigation, along with the vessel’s speed, communications among the crew and other issues.
Allen and other Coast Guard officials said that the first Coast Guard boat was at the scene at 9:20 a.m., a little less than an hour after the crash, and it surveyed the bridge and then followed the oil slick to the boat that already had been docked.
The massive cleanup effort continued Sunday as oil reached the southern tip of Point Reyes National Seashore, according to the National Parks Service.
Lisa Curtis, the spill prevention and response administrator with the state Department of Fish and Game, said a total of 465 live oiled birds had been rescued, while 196 had turned up dead.
She expected that number to increase over the next few days.
Officials said they would be training volunteers on how to handle hazardous materials to bolster the cleanup effort, while Curtis said that for future spills she hoped a group of volunteers could be pre-trained to respond immediately.
Winds shifted toward the northwest on Sunday, posing new problems for wildlife rescue crews who kept busy monitoring beaches across the Peninsula looking for oiled seabirds.
“I think we’re going to see a few more since the wind has shifted and the slick is moving this way,” said Sue Pemberton, a local volunteer with the Peninsula Humane Society who personally picked up seven oiled birds Saturday in Pacifica’s Esplanade Beach, Rockaway Beach and Linda Mar Beach, as well as Montara State Beach just south of Devils Slide.
The spill has also devastated the area’s Dungeness crab industry. Citing concerns over contamination, local crabbers are asking that the commercial crabbing season, which starts Thursday, be postponed.
The Coast Guard announced Sunday that Angel Island State Park will reopen to the public today, though the island’s beach areas will remain closed.
The Associated Press and Bay Area News Group writer Julia Scott contributed to this report.
-jot from san jose mercury news
