The 2007 San Francisco Bay Oil Spill: Lessons Learned, Questions, and Policies

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Warner Chabot
Vice President
Ocean Conservancy

Today and this week the San Francisco Bay oil spill has moved into the phase of oversight hearings by our political leaders.

Ocean Conservancy wants to offer the following lessons learned (to-date) from the spill; a set of key questions that should be answered (to further learn what worked and did not work. Finally we want to suggest some policies that should be considered, (to avoid a repeat of this disaster).

We believe that is premature to launch a detailed discussion of solutions, since we still don’t have all of the facts about what worked and did not work. However, since several political leaders have scheduled oversight hearings, we offer the following possible lessons, questions and suggested actions.

Preliminary Lessons Emerging from the 2007 SF Bay Oil Spill:

1. As the foggiest harbor in the U.S., with almost 4,000 major ship arrivals to S.F. Bay each year (and 10,000 ship moves), the odds for human, mechanical or electronic error in navigation make an occasional collision and resulting spill virtually inevitable.

2. The size of cargo ships is increasing – most are single hulls and most carry enormous amounts of fuel in tanks that are located at water level. The Cosco Busan spill could have been 10 times larger.

3. Because oil spills spread exponentially, containment (in the first few hours), is the most critical factor in a successful spill response.

4. The ecological and economic impact of a spill on our coast or bay ecosystems can be vastly compounded by human error in communication or logistics that delay the response during the critical first hours.

5. The available information on the Cosco Busan indicates that the existing procedures (or their implementation) failed to contain a fuel-oil spill of modest size, even when the point of origin occurred only one mile from a substantial stockpile of spill response equipment.*

6. The best-available oil-skimmer technology can only recover a small percentage of a spill if it is not contained in the critical first hours.

7. Spill prevention is much cheaper than attempts at cleanup, and prevention deserves a higher priority from our society and our leaders than it has received in recent times.