San Francisco Bay oil spill
 
On Wednesday, November 7th, 2007, at 8:24 in the morning, the tide flooded into the bay through the Golden Gate at 2.7 knots. The fog was thick. Thick like ‘can’t see your hand’ thick. A container ship, the Cosco Busan, was about to pass beneath the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Her crew was new to the ship, and they had just left Oakland for the first time.
 
   No thanks. The combination of dense fog and unfamiliar waters equals “let’s fix some more broken stuff before we weigh anchor and split” in my book. Granted, this is a commercial freighter.
 
In the pea soup, she manages to side-swipe the bridge around 8:30. The gash you see ruptured her port fuel tank, spilling its contents into the bay.
 
    The bar pilot on board the ship has seven incidents noted in his 25 year career, including running aground outside the channel near Antioch in 2006, and having inspired a letter by the Navy regarding a close call with an aircraft carrier.
 
Initial reports put the spill at 140 gallons. Slack water at 11:12 AM allowed the slick to stop migrating into the bay and congeal, like the suds in the sink, as the water in the bay began to ebb for the afternoon. The tide flowed out of the bay at almost 4 knots that afternoon, which led to the majority of the spill to be removed from the confines of the bay and deposited into the ocean. Unfortunately, fourteen hours later the volume was upgraded to 58,000 gallons of heavy bunker fuel -- a viscous, greasy, sticky mess oozing liquid hydrocarbons. That afternoon, sailboats returned to their slips covered in globs of sticky grime and the sheen of spilled fuel.  Birds floundered on shorelines, unable to keep warm for the fuel in their feathers.
It has been claimed that 75% of the oil left in the bay has either been recovered or evaporated. The oil remains on the shoreline up and down the coast, covering beaches with tar. It reminds me of the beaches near Santa Barbara, where tar washes up on shore from natural deposits near the channel islands, except that there is one hundred times more oil. Dozens of beaches and parks have closed, and the boating community has avoided the water to facilitate the clean-up. Scientists speculate that the bay could take years to recover, and winter storms are expected to scour the shoreline, redistributing the oil that has accumulated there.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Regardless of how or why this happened, I think the focus should be on improving the first response to such an incident. If the Coast Guard had investigated the extent of the spill immediately, they could have contained the bulk of the oil within the bay. As it was, they missed their opportunity as the ebb drew the spill outside the gate, resulting in much more extensive damage to our Northern California coast. Let’s hope that some reform comes from this environmental tragedy.
 
Friday, November 16, 2007