SAN FRANCISCO — The oil spill plaguing San Francisco Bay has raised fresh questions about the changing mission of the U.S. Coast Guard, with critics Monday saying the agency's new homeland security duties have eroded its ability to tackle such environmental disasters.
In recent years, Coast Guard staff and institutional emphasis have been shifted more toward port and coastal protection duties than marine safety and environmental response. Meanwhile, important equipment used in spill response has aged, insiders say, and training drills -- routine in the years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska -- are fewer and farther between.
Last March, the Coast Guard disbanded its department that helped set up those oil-spill response exercises and reassigned more than a dozen people to homeland security duties.
Coast Guard officials have defended their efforts over the last week, saying they launched a quick and decisive spill response after the cargo vessel Cosco Busan sideswiped the San Francisco-Bay Bridge on Wednesday and began leaking 58,000 gallons of sticky, heavy bunker fuel.
But they also have acknowledged that they failed to quickly grasp the magnitude of the spill -- originally thought to be only 140 gallons -- or to make a timely report to local officials and the public, who remained largely in the dark for a dozen hours after the accident.
If errors were made, "we'll be held accountable," said Rear Adm. Craig Bone, the Coast Guard's top officer in California. "We're responsible. And we'll make the changes that need to be made."
Over the weekend, the National Transportation Safety Board took over the accident investigation from the Coast Guard and promised to review the initial response. The U.S. attorney in San Francisco has also stepped in to see if civil or criminal charges are warranted against the ship's crew or owners.
The investigation has so far focused on human error, but NTSB officials said Monday the board was also looking at a possible equipment malfunction and a language gap between the Chinese crew and the English-speaking pilot. An attorney for Capt. John Cota, the local mariner assigned to pilot the ship out of the bay, said Monday that the radar was broken. In addition, the attorney said, the ship's captain -- who ceded control of the vessel to Cota in the bay -- provided incorrect information from the navigation system.
"He was left hanging out there in the fog," said the attorney, John Meadows of San Francisco.
The Coast Guard, meanwhile, remains under fire from politicians and the media in the San Francisco region, where the Sierra Club has its headquarters -- as well as 55,000 card-carrying members -- and where the namesake bay represents a glistening embodiment of the environmental ethos.
While insisting the spill response could not have been more aggressive, Coast Guard officials admit to a bit of institutional soul-searching.
"After Sept. 11, 2001, we were all about security. Everyone was," said Dan Dewel, a Coast Guard spokesman at the regional headquarters in Alameda.
Now the Coast Guard is looking at tactics and strategies, "trying to find the right mix, balance and structure," Dewel said. "The Coast Guard has to rewire its connections among its different parts so that we can be as flexible and responsive as possible."
If there's been a reduction in operations, he said, "we'll find a way to fix that."
In reshaping its focus after 9/11, critics say, the Coast Guard has let its relationships with port users, shippers and fishermen deteriorate. That is because marine safety and environmental response strategies require close cooperation. Anti-terrorism tactics, however, tend to be secretive and rigid.
"It's changed big-time, in the sense everything now is focused on the war on terror," said Zeke Grader, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Assns. A decade ago, Bay Area fishermen were counted on by the Coast Guard to help mop up oil spills. Dozens of fishing boats and anglers were certified to deal with spills, Grader said. "It was like a volunteer fire department kind of thing."
But officials let the program lapse, he said. And when the fishermen approached the Coast Guard to help, they were told not to bother, said Larry Collins, president of the San Francisco Crab Boat Owners Assn.
They hit the water anyway over the weekend after the Port of San Francisco stepped up to get Coast Guard permission. In all, 22 boats have participated since Sunday, dragging big, absorbent pompoms to collect the fuel, Collins said, adding: "We're getting a lot of oil."
Politicians have been touring the spill site in recent days, critiquing the response.
The latest broadside came Monday morning, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and a group of local Democratic lawmakers held a shoreline news conference to announce congressional hearings into the spill and its aftermath.
