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.
