Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
November 15, 2007
5. Agencies, Programs, People
Coast Guard replaces its commander in spill disaster -
San Francisco Chronicle
Senators blast Coast Guard response to bay oil spill -
San Francisco Chronicle
Spill response workers say not enough of them were available -
San Francisco Chronicle
Daniel Weintraub: New index measures greenhouse gas goal progress
Doubt shrouds flood-protection system at Sutter site
Army Corps of Engineers to investigate effectiveness of Star
Marysville Appeal Democrat
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Coast Guard replaces its commander in spill disaster
San Francisco Chronicle – 11/15/07
By Kevin Fagan, Demian Bulwa, Zachary Coile, staff writers
(11-14) 16:58 PST San Francisco - -- The Coast Guard was rocked by new developments Wednesday in the wake of the huge San Francisco Bay oil spill as the agency shoved aside its Bay Area disaster commander, began a wide-ranging probe of its actions after the accident and admitted it had mishandled drug tests for crew members of the ship that struck the Bay Bridge.
Capt. William Uberti, who led the initial response after the Cosco Busan struck a bridge tower on Nov. 7 and dumped 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel, was replaced by Capt. Paul Gugg, an experienced specialist in oil disasters.
The commander of the 11th Coast Guard District, Rear Adm. Craig Bone, stopped short of saying Uberti was fired. Bone said he decided on the replacement "considering the magnitude of this response operation, the level of public interest, and problems I have identified related to the initial spill response communications and coordination."
Uberti has been criticized for waiting four hours to inform the public that the spill was larger than 140 gallons and for allowing the gunky fuel to foul more than 30 beaches along the bay and ocean coastline. He will return to his usual duty as commander of the San Francisco-area Coast Guard operations.
Gugg, 49, has crafted spill regulations and response plans in
"I have had the opportunity to be briefed by the team here, and I've been very impressed with what's taken place recently," Gugg said at a press briefing at the response command center on
The cost of the spill, counting cleanup efforts and damage to the
As the Coast Guard's new commander overseeing the spill was announced in California, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the commandant of the agency, underwent a grilling in Congress and announced that he has initiated an unusually "comprehensive review" of the Coast Guard's actions after the accident.
The review's investigators will include representatives from the city of
"While we would not normally initiate an ISPR (Incident Specific Preparedness Review) review during the course of an ongoing cleanup operation, I have determined that due to the severity of this incident and the potential benefits in identifying areas to improve response coordination and communication in the future, it is imperative that we get this review under way as quickly as possible," Allen said.
His comments came at a Senate briefing where California Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein took turns querying federal officials over the spill response. Feinstein pressed Allen about whether there was a "muddled" response for lack of a central leader coordinating all the actions of cleanup and response crews.
Under federal rules, the Coast Guard takes the lead in responding to a spill but must act in partnership with the entity responsible for the spill and top state officials. Allen said he believes the split leadership often works well but was not effective in responding to last week's spill.
Also topmost among the concerns at the Washington briefing were revelations by the Coast Guard that it and the owners of the Cosco Busan freighter failed to ensure that members of the ship's crew were tested for drugs within 32 hours after the ship hit the bridge as required by federal regulations.
"If they didn't follow the protocol, and let's say people were keeling over with drugs and they got away with it, there ought to be a penalty for that - and we'll never know," Boxer said.
Coast Guard officials said Wednesday that the ship's operators did not test some of the relevant crew members - those with duties potentially linking them to the crash - for drugs until 53 hours after the incident.
It is the responsibility of the owner and operator of a vessel to test crew members immediately after an incident, but the Coast Guard is responsible for making sure the testing rules are strictly followed.
The results of the drugs tests for the Cosco Busan crew members are not yet back from the lab, and it's not clear yet if the delay could have undermined the efficacy of the tests.
Alcohol tests also were apparently done slightly late, but not as tardy as the drug assessments. Coast Guard officials say they will investigate to see what might have gone wrong.
"It certainly shows the operator missed a crucial detail," said Lt. Commander Tony Guild, who oversees inspections, investigations and analysts for the Coast Guard's Western region.
Guild said a Coast Guard casualty investigator was told Friday by an agent for the ship's owner, Regal Stone Ltd., that the Cosco Busan crew had not yet been tested for drugs.
"(The agent) said, 'We only tested the master for drugs, so the Coast Guard investigating officer said, 'You need to test everybody,' " Guild said. The master is the ship's captain, Mao Cai Sun.
Guild said the Coast Guard investigator moved quickly to order the drug tests, but acknowledged that the agency bore some responsibility for failing to get the tests done on time.
The alcohol testing for pilot John Cota and the Cosco Busan's crew also apparently took place late, but Coast Guard officials say that discrepancy was not as serious - and may not ultimately violate any regulations.
Cota was tested for alcohol at 10:29 a.m. Nov. 7, two hours and two minutes after the ship hit the bridge tower, and then for drugs at 10:35 a.m. Both tests, conducted by the San Francisco Bar Pilots Association, came back negative, Guild said.
Then, between 11:24 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., the crew of the ship's bridge and chief engineer were tested for alcohol. Those tests have come back negative.
The alcohol tests were supposed to be conducted within two hours, but federal regulations allow an exception to delay testing when the safety of the vessel is still in question. The Cosco Busan was being moved to two different anchorages after the ship spilled its oil at 8:27 a.m., according to several accounts.
"In this particular case, it's not serious at all," Guild said of the belated alcohol tests.
A spokesman for Regal Stone Ltd. said that he was unfamiliar with the latest information, but that the last word he had from the Coast Guard was that the tests were done properly.
Meanwhile, 53 ships were working the waters on cleanup duty Wednesday while 1,517 people attacked the oil on beaches and in lagoons. More than 12,745 gallons of oil have been collected from the water so far, the Coast Guard reported. An additional 580 gallons have been dispersed naturally, and 4,060 gallons of oil have evaporated.
More than 1,500 birds have been collected, either injured or killed by oil. #
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/15/MNFETCBQT.DTL
Senators blast Coast Guard response to bay oil spill
San Francisco Chronicle – 11/15/07
By Zachary
Lawmakers on Wednesday criticized the Coast Guard's response to last week's oil spill in
"There is no doubt in this case something went wrong," said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate Commerce subcommittee that oversees the Coast Guard. "Either the plan wasn't good enough or it wasn't a good plan."
Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard commandant who has defended his agency in recent days, acknowledged at Wednesday's Senate subcommittee briefing that the response was not adequate. He announced that he is replacing the commander who led the response, and within 90 days will make public the results of an investigation into what went wrong.
"It won't be the Coast Guard investigating the Coast Guard," Allen added, saying that other federal, state and Bay Area agencies will all be involved.
The Senate meeting was called by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., on such short notice it couldn't be listed as an official hearing and had to be labeled a "briefing." But the trappings were the same: a Senate hearing room where officials from the Coast Guard sat on the hot seat for two hours answering questions.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., described what she called a muddled response by the Coast Guard-led incident command. She said the division of responsibility among three groups - the Coast Guard, the private contractor dispatched by the ship's owner for the cleanup, and the state's Office of Spill Prevention and Response - slowed the response.
"It just seems to me there has to be one instant authority, across the board," Feinstein said. "Am I wrong about that?"
"No," Allen replied. "And quite frankly the Coast Guard is the authority. The unified command system is used routinely every day in this country. ... It works. The question is why it didn't work in this case."
Feinstein said she saw other flaws in the response to the Nov. 7 spill caused when the freighter Cosco Busan struck the Bay Bridge: Drug tests on the crew were conducted late, and the drug and alcohol tests for the pilot, John Cota, were carried out by members of the Pilot Association, his union, which she suggested was not an unbiased party.
Feinstein suggested that the Coast Guard should be given increased authority to police the shipping lanes, including enforcing speed limits, especially during foggy conditions such as existed when the ship struck the bridge. She pressed Allen on whether freighters with fuel tanks below the water line should be required to have double hulls to prevent future spills.
"That would certainly decrease the chance of a spill related to the fuel tank," Allen said.
Snowe said the biggest flaw in the Coast Guard's response was its failure to quickly determine the real size of the spill. Initial reports pegged the spill at 140 gallons.
"What kind of response would it have been if you had known initially it was a 58,000-gallon oil spill?" she asked. "I have to believe it would have been a totally different response."
Allen said some skimmers were deployed within about an hour, which he described as a quick response.
"The question is did they deploy enough and to the right places?" he said. "We need a detailed investigation to tell us whether that occurred."
Coast Guard logs show it wasn't until almost 5 p.m. - more than eight hours after the crash happened - that officials determined that 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel had poured from the freighter's tanks into the bay.
Deb Self, executive director of Baykeeper, an environmental group, testified at the briefing that the Coast Guard ignored reports early in the day from other boats that fuel was spilling out of a gaping hole in the side of the freighter. She said the decision to move the ship to two different anchorages only worsened the problem.
"Everywhere it went, it left a huge swath of some of the worst looking stuff I've ever seen," Self said.
Self said more of the oil could have been contained if the O'Brien's Group, the contractor hired by the ship's owner to clean the mess, had moved immediately to put a boom around the vessel. "The response was woefully inadequate," she said.
Boxer said she was angry that state and federal officials did not revoke the license of the pilot, Cota, who had four incidents on his record over the last 14 years, including running a ship aground near
"Even though you know he had these problems you didn't take away his federal (shipping) license?"
Rear Adm. Brian Salerno of the Coast Guard said the state licenses pilots that operate in state waters, and his agency had no jurisdiction in this case.
"That doesn't make people sleep better at night," Boxer replied.
Boxer recommended lower speed limits for ships in the bay, especially in periods of dense fog. She also lashed out at the Coast Guard and the contractor for turning away offers of help from local cities and volunteers seeking to clean up the mess.
"The people who want to help can't help?" she said. "It's inexcusable."#
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/15/MNRPTCHH7.DTL
Spill response workers say not enough of them were available
San Francisco Chronicle – 11/15/07
By Peter Fimrite, staff writer
Much of the oil that spilled into the bay from the cargo ship that rammed the
The employees of Marine Spill Response Corp., which was under contract with the owner of the Cosco Busan container vessel to clean up the 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel oil, said there were about 18 cleanup workers available at the company's three sites in
"We were just damned lucky that that ship wasn't a tanker," said one of the workers, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the firm has told employees not to talk to the press. "If that had been a tanker, we would have been ... I don't even want to think about how bad it would have been."
Judith Norell, a spokeswoman for Marine Spill Response, said the company's policy is to have enough people available for an initial response and to bolster them with on-call workers from around the country. The policy, called "cascading," is commonly used throughout the country, she said.
"We have about 400 personnel dedicated to spill response nationwide," Norell said. "Those people are available, and all of them wear pagers."
Marine Spill Response is a national nonprofit firm funded primarily by oil companies. Norell said the company has responded to more than 500 oil spills since 1993.
Cleanup officials and representatives of the Cosco Busan said there were five skimmers on the scene of the spill within two hours of the accident Nov. 7, enough to recover all the oil had it not been swept away by the tides.
But the workers interviewed Wednesday disputed that the response was adequate.
"Initially if they had had more, they probably could have recovered more," said another worker, who has 35 years of experience in the maritime industry and almost as much in oil cleanup operations. "The beginning is real critical before everything gets mixed up with the tides and the currents and the wind."
He said he was one of those called in to respond to the spill. He arrived in the Bay Area at midnight Wednesday, the same time other workers were arriving from
"By the time I got there and went to work, (the oil) had spread out all over everywhere," he said.
About three dozen Marine Spill Response employees were brought in from outside the Bay Area, according to the workers. Close to 70 trained oil cleanup workers were on vessels working the spill when the operation was in full force, said Craig Merrilees, spokesman for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which is trying to negotiate a contract with the company for oil spill responders.
The firm "chooses to employ minimal staffing at their locations," Merrilees said. "In an environment like
The two workers and several colleagues, who work in locations throughout
Complaints about staffing are not new in the industry. In 1995, Marine Spill Response reduced its staff to 177 employees from 441, the ILWU said. After 2003, the company merged union cleanup cooperatives in
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/15/MNRDTCHD4.DTL
Daniel Weintraub: New index measures greenhouse gas goal progress
Sacramento
As
The new state mandate will require industries to change the way they do business and will almost certainly involve fees or taxes designed to increase the cost of anything that involves burning carbon – the essential element behind the fuel that moves our cars, the gas that heats our homes and most of the electricity that lights and cools our buildings.
If
Not only would that hurt
Noel Perry, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, believes that the Democrats who pushed AB 32 through the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed it, were right when they said that California can have it all. The state can green its economy and grow it, too.
But Perry, as an investor, also has a habit of measuring his assumptions against reality. So he has undertaken a project to assess
The California Green Innovation Index is a product of Next 10, a nonprofit Perry founded two years ago to help citizens and policymakers understand the state's long-standing fiscal mess. That online model, which you can find at www.next10.org, presents background information and a series of choices players can make to see how to balance the budget with either spending cuts, tax increases or both over the next 10 years.
As its name suggests, Perry's latest endeavor focuses on innovation because he believes technological progress will be crucial to reducing greenhouse gases without slowing economic growth. The index, housed at the same Web site as the budget game, includes 45 measures of environmental progress and economic growth, sometimes comparing both at the same time.
"I hope it will inform the debate in this state and give a factual basis for decision-making," Perry said last week. "We are not advocates. We are trying to put out information that people can trust."
The index measures investment in "green" businesses, clean-technology patents, solar power installations, electricity use and utility bills, and much more. It has data on vehicle miles traveled, gasoline sales and public transit use. It even records how much energy Californians use pumping water – which is responsible for a surprising 20 percent of the state's electricity use.
While the format of this year's inaugural presentation is a bit unwieldy, Perry promises that the foundation will update the index annually and that future versions will include a single chart from which citizens can track progress or the lack of it across the range of measures.
A key measure that sums up the entire challenge is one that compares carbon emissions per million people to the state's economic output.
Ideally, the two lines would move in opposite directions.
"We want the economy to grow while we want emissions to decline," said Doug Henton, an economist and Next 10 adviser. "That's it in a nutshell."
Interestingly, that's also pretty much what has been happening over the past decade – even without the state's intervention.
But AB 32 raises the bar. It requires not just a reduction in carbon emissions per person, but a big reduction in the total amount of emissions, even as the state's population is expected to continue to grow by more than a half-million people per year. And as the innovation index shows,
Perry compares the greenhouse gas reduction goals to
"We've got our work cut out for us," Perry said. "AB 32 is a very challenging mandate."
Next 10's index can't settle the debate about whether the latest environmental policies are a hindrance or a help to the economy. But it will be a valuable resource for people on both sides of that divide who want to debate the issue with facts and not just assumptions and ideology.#
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/492668.html
North American flora can't absorb continent's greenhouse gas output
San Francisco Chronicle – 11/15/07
By David Perlman, science editor
The outpouring of greenhouse gases from North America far outstrips the ability of the continent's fields, forests and wetlands to absorb all the carbon in the atmosphere, and the
All told, the burning of fossil fuels by the
Until now, many scientists had thought the continent holds enough vegetation to absorb most of the carbon dioxide emissions, but the new report refutes that assumption and warns that the disparity is increasing.
The entire continent accounts for 27 percent of all the carbon dioxide emissions in the world, says the report, but
"This is the first systematic assessment of
Field is the lead author of a section of the report that deals with the carbon cycle - a kind of balance sheet calculating how much climate-changing gas is emitted by North American power plants, vehicles and industry and how much is absorbed by the forests, crops, soils and surrounding ocean waters that constitute what scientists call the carbon sink.
"By burning fossil fuel and clearing forests, human beings have significantly altered the global carbon cycle," Field said.
As a result, he and his colleagues who drew up the report calculated that the continent emits more than three times the amount of carbon dioxide than its varied sinks are capable of absorbing. All the rest stays in the atmosphere and creates the heat-trapping greenhouse effect that has been warming the planet for the past century.
"The conversion of fossil fuels to energy, such as electricity generation, is the single largest carbon contributor, with transportation second," the report said.
As for the lagging ability of forests, parks, soils and green croplands to absorb the carbon, the report is highly pessimistic about the future.
"Carbon absorption by vegetation, primarily in the form of forest growth, is expected to decline as maturing forests grow more slowly and take up less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," the experts said.
Wildfires that strip vegetation from huge swaths of land also reduce the ability of the carbon sink to function, and Field noted that last month's forest fires in Southern California that blackened 740,000 acres in five counties will have a significant impact on the state's future ability to absorb its output of greenhouse gases - despite California's leadership in green technology and in curbing carbon dioxide emissions.
"That land may recover in 10 or 20 years, and plants may return" Field said, "but there are more wildfires every year, and we haven't prevented them."
As climate continues to warm and droughts increase all across
In
From his own experience and discussions with colleagues working on the new report, none of that happened this time, Field said. The words "warming" and "climate change" appear in the report's summary released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.#
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/15/MNC4TCDAE.DTL
Doubt shrouds flood-protection system at Sutter site
Army Corps of Engineers to investigate effectiveness of Star
Marysville Appeal Democrat – 11/15/07
By John Dickey, staff writer
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will investigate whether a flood-protection system at one of
Corps of Engineers-installed relief wells are supposed to drain a
About $15,000 will be spent by the Corps’
“They’ll take a quick look at the wells, probably talk to the levee district,” said Corps of Engineers spokesman Dave Killam.
While the investigation will be brief – including a day of field work – it could serve to line up more money for repairs next year from Congress. The information will determine the scope of the problem, generating a project information report.
So far, it appears that two of the 12 relief wells may not be working properly, said Killam. They may be pulling water from outside of the well casing rather than inside.
A relief well is a well drilled near the inland side of the levee or dam to relieve groundwater pressure. Too much pressure can lead to seepage, a flow of water that can remove material from underneath the levee and cause it to collapse.
The system the Corps of Engineers installed in 1998 through 1999 was designed to intercept seepage that has occurred in the
The district became concerned after boils appeared near the relief wells during a relatively minor storm in January 2006. The storm, roughly a one-in-10 year event, brought the river just about to the levee toe.
“The boils popped up just a few feet away from the relief wells,” said District Manager Bill Hampton.
“That’s why we’ve been pushing for something to be done,” said
http://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/levee_56539___article.html/wells_flood.html
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