Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  On the ship safety side of the equation, much of the U.S. shipyard work that Coast Guard inspectors used to oversee, from the laying of keels to the installation of cables, electrical systems, machinery, fuel tanks, and decking, is now done by private classification societies with the Coast Guard doing general oversight. U.S. ship designs are still run through the Coast Guard’s design center, and the Coast Guard still carefully reviews cargoes and safety systems for oil and other hazardous materials coming into U.S. ports, in part because they represent an ongoing security threat.

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  n September 10, 2002, a Coast Guard boarding team heard noises below the deck of the Liberian-flagged freighter Palermo Senator docked in New York. They then measured and got a nuclear hit, a strong radiation signal from the vessel. The ship’s manifest, they quickly discovered, included rugs from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The president was due in the city for the first anniversary of 9/11. The ship was immediately ordered offshore, where a NEST— Nuclear Emergency Support Team—from the Department of Energy and a contingent of Navy SEALs joined the Coast Guard. After lots of excitement they figured out that the ship was carrying undeclared pottery and tiles. Ocean water lacks the radioisotopes commonly found in soils and clay, so background radiation, particularly from fired ceramics, will stand out strongly on a vessel. The suspicious noise below deck turned out to be a pipe that had been rolling around.

  Two years later, in the summer of 2004, everyone got scared again when the Department of Agriculture received an e-mail saying there was a “biological agent” on the Rio Puelo, a container ship bringing Argentine lemons to Canada. The e-mail even gave the number of the containers that the bioagent was allegedly being smuggled in. An Incident Command Center was established for the Coast Guard, DHS, FBI, and others while the ship was held off the coast of New Jersey for nine days. Eventually, after a Coast Guard boarding team was placed on the ship and a battery of biohazard tests conducted, it was escorted into Newark, where its million-pound cargo was fumigated for anthrax and incinerated. Apparently someone figured that if all you have is lemons, make smoke. It’s now thought the e-mail may have been sent by one of the grower’s Latin American competitors.

  Also, of course, right after 9/11 the Captain of the Port of Boston forbade liquefied natural gas ships from entering the harbor for fear they might be used as weapons of mass destruction. “An LNG ship is safer than an aviation gas or ammonia ship,” Bone claims. “LNG burns, but it’s very hard to make it explode. If I had a handheld rocket, I could think of better targets.

  “Also, you look at how the Sansinena [a Union Oil tanker] blew up in LA Harbor in 1976 [killing nine people and injuring fifty-six in a huge conflagration that damaged over 250 other ships]. That was a safety incident, not a terrorist incident,” he notes. “I am a prevention guy, and we’re very passionate about what we do. When a marine inspector leaves a ship, he’s willing to place his family members or shipmates aboard knowing that ship can now survive a collision or other event and get people safely off.

  “Interventions [Coast Guard safety inspections and corrections] take place every day from dinner-cruise and whale-watching boats to big ferries to cruise ships and LNG ships. More awards should go to people who prevent search and rescues [or oil spill responses] from having to take place.”

  Still, as Senior Chief Rob Bushie, who used to run the small boat station in Maui, told me, “No one ever got a Gold Lifesaving Medal for designing a safer bilge pump.”

  By the time my interview with the admiral is over at 4:30, the district’s chief of public affairs has gone home for the day. I go home to find my waterfront being posted with oil pollution warning signs.

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  n Thursday I call the Golden Gate Surf Station to see if I can go out with them. “If you’re interested in the oil spill, you don’t want to come here,” Chief Morgan tells me. “We haven’t been given any tasking on that. We’re just doing our regular LE [law enforcement] and SAR work.”

  The same day, fishermen whose crab season opening will be postponed offer to help with the cleanup but are turned down by the Coast Guard and the contractors. The city of San Francisco then hires them to help out.

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  y Friday the bunker fuel is all over the bay and out the Golden Gate. I talk to the Pacific Strike Team’s CO, Cdr. Mike Day, and learn that no skimmers, booms, or other response equipment stored in their big airplane hangar at Novato is being used, though they’ve assigned people to help organize a command center at Fort Mason. “If they’re not satisfied with the contractors, they’ll call us in,” he tells me. The “they” he’s referring to is the Unified Command made up of the contractors working for the Hong Kong shipping company Regal Stone (“the responsible party”), the Coast Guard, and the State of California.

  “The strike team’s assets cost a lot of money,” he’ll later explain, “so the responsible party that pays for the cleanup [under the Oil Spill Prevention Act of 1990] would rather not use them. If their Certificate of Financial Responsibility—$61 million liability insurance—is exceeded, then we’re called in.”

  Under this system, the oil and shipping companies responsible for large spills have been paying about three-quarters of the cleanup costs over the last decade, with the federal government picking up the difference, according to a study by the GAO, the Government Accountability Office.

  Still, according to that January 2008 report commissioned by the Coast Guard, the contractor did have enough skimmers on the water during the first days of the spill. Unfortunately, the state of cleanup technology is such that their recovering 20 percent of the spilled oil was considered a huge success.

  A press conference is called at Rodeo Beach, where they’ve started cleaning oil that’s come ashore. No containment booms have yet been placed by the Berkeley Marina, at the entry to the lagoon in Bolinas, or by the wetlands where I live in Richmond. Over forty miles of shoreline will eventually be impacted.

  I go to the press conference in the Marin Headlands that’s taking place between visits of concern by the governor, California’s two senators, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen. I pass a coyote and a red-tailed hawk on the way in. This was my late love Nancy Ledansky’s favorite local beach. This is where we held her memorial service after she died of breast cancer at the age of forty-three. She’d wondered about environmental factors that may have contributed to her illness.

  Now orange plastic fencing and oil spill warning signs block access to the wide cliff-framed strand where fifty-eight contract workers in yellow hazmat suits are removing oil-stained boulders and scraping away contaminated sand with a small front loader called a Bobcat. I’ve seen real bobcats around here and hope they don’t find any dead seabirds to feed on, as toxins tend to bioaccumulate up the food chain.

  At the end of the two-lane road is a crowd of park police and rangers, TV satellite trucks, reporters, and State Assemblyman Mark Leno. A Dolphin 65 flies by with city officials on board. A caravan of cars and a van from the Unified Command arrives.

  I say hello to Captain Uberti, a bluff bald guy with glasses and a white mustache, who is now the federal official in charge. In 1978, as an OCS student, he sailed on the training ship Cuyahoga with half his class. The next week the other half went out and were run down by a large freighter. Four officers and seven crew died. This spill will be the second disaster of his career and will see him replaced as incident commander in less than a week and take early retirement by the end of the month. Right now he’s still got his game face on, however.

  I ask him about delays in communications, and he dismisses them as not significant. “Everything that needed to be done in terms of response was getting done that morning,” he says before striding over to a speaker’s podium that’s been placed in the road.

  “This is the first time in a long time anything like this has occurred,” he tells the banked cameras and reporters before letting Barry McFarland, a big hefty guy from the O’Brien
s Group, the lead contractor, answer their questions. Barry says the response was good and by 11:00 A.M. (two and a half hours after the collision) five skimming vessels were on scene or on the way. He says they’ve collected eight thousand gallons of oil and oily liquids in two days and have a hundred-plus workers out there today and two hundred more on the way. I ask why the Coast Guard’s National Strike Team gear hasn’t been used.

  “If the Coast Guard is the best tool for us, we’ll use it,” he claims.

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  aturday morning my friend Scott Fielder and I look for oil behind my house and then for bird rescue people to net the several dozen oil-stained birds we spot hauled up on the marina’s small beaches. At least five thousand birds will die in the coming days.

  The state Fish and Game agency calls informational meetings for volunteers in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Richmond Harbor. When hundreds of people turn out ready to work, they’re told to stay away from the beaches, that the oil is toxic and they will be subject to arrest if they try to clean it up. It’s a classic case of how in a moment of crisis government’s innate fear of the people (and of legal liability) can help make things worse.

  The San Francisco Baykeeper, Surfrider Foundation, and other environmental groups organize their own volunteer programs. Some people stage “guerrilla” beach cleanups. One man is handcuffed and cited for refusing orders to stop cleaning up big globs of oil on Muir Beach in Marin County.

  In the afternoon I drive to the Incident Command Post, which has moved from Fort Mason to the old Officers Club on Treasure Island next to Yerba Buena Island.

  The Incident Command System that’s in play here started with the U.S. Forest Service coordinating different agencies fighting western wildfires in the 1970s and was later refined by the Coast Guard strike teams in response to major oil spills.

  The main room is divided into distinct groupings.

  There’s the Situations table with a GIS (geographic information system) unit trying to update incident maps.

  The Operations area is made up of eight folding tables pushed together with more than a dozen people and their laptops, sodas, and snacks trying to direct the immediate response. Strike team members are well represented here.

  Nearby is the Resource table run by a Strike Team reservist, Chief Gary Burns, trying to keep tabs on where people and stuff are at any given moment.

  There’s a Planning section trying to estimate where the oil will be tomorrow and what cultural or environmental impacts it will have.

  There’s also a Logistics and Finance table that’s keeping a running count on materials and costs involved.

  Up against the far wall is the Environmental table. “We don’t have our people there. They’re mostly Ph.D.’s and biologists,” the strike team’s Mike Day tells me. Occupying this table are scientists and resource managers from the National Park Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), California Fish and Game, and its Office of Spill Prevention and Response assessing impacts on critical habitats in the bay and along the coast.

  There are some two hundred people in and around the command post today and seven hundred in the field. Too many cooks, I think. Mike Day has twenty-eight strike team people working the center and another nine in Southern California going through burned-out neighborhoods identifying hazardous materials in the wake of their big wildfires a few weeks earlier.

  The strike team has three rafts they’ll be bringing down from their hangar on Sunday for beach damage assessments. I ask if I can go along, and he says they’ll make room for me on Monday.

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  o Sunday I watch more beach cleanups, make calls, and take notes. I run into three citizens trying to capture oiled ducks to send to the Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia, where they’re being cleaned. Caitlin, Christine, and Julie won’t give me their last names for fear Fish and Game might arrest them. That night’s TV news has aerial footage of a pod of dolphins swimming through the oil.

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  onday morning at 7:00 A.M. I return to the command post. There is now a huge strike team trailer out front with the Coast Guard logo and red racing stripe displayed on its sides for all the world and media to see. I run into Captain Uberti, who tells me about Commandant Allen’s visit on Sunday and again doesn’t give me a direct answer when I ask about communications problems that first day.

  Barry McFarland from the O’Briens Group gives the morning briefing, followed by someone from Fish and Game, the captain, and Admiral Bone, who tells the gathered crowd, “You’ve turned this around. I did two overflights yesterday. Don’t react to the stuff you read. People in this room and in the field are doing a fantastic job, and you can be proud of what you’ve done. Hopefully at the end of the day the people of San Francisco—they’re venting some now— but just stay sensitive and understand it’s their homes and issues, though I know for many of you it’s also your homes and issues. I’m proud of you.”

  I join the SCAT—Shoreline Cleanup and Assessment Team—in the parking lot. It’s headed by Bruce Joab, a toxicologist from the Office of Spill Prevention and Response, and includes Jacob Henry, an EPA consultant, Bosun’s Mate Second Class David Varela, and Bosun’s Mate First Class Gary Cohen from the strike team.

  Maritime Safety and Security Team members will be driving the rafts, an example of the linked-up Deployable Operations Group in action, if not a particularly striking one. Earlier the DOG sent Pacific Strike Team members to Hawaii to act as extra muscle, fearing a new confrontation with environmental protestors opposed to the interisland Superferry.

  We drive over the hill to Yerba Buena and down to the boat basin, where three orange 25-foot Defenders and the three black rafts are waiting. Ours will be heading over to Richardson Bay by Sausalito.

  Our recon team pulls out maps of Richardson, a large inlet off the main part of the bay. The MSST teams in their body armor turn and salute the flag as it’s raised at 8:00 A.M. This seems odd only because the flagpole is on the other side of a building where we can’t see it.

  We tie a 15-foot Avon raft with an old two-stroke outboard behind one of the 25s, let out some line, and head off across the bay.

  In the middle of the bay, I spot a large sea otter swimming along on its back. They’re a rare sight in San Francisco, and normally I’d be thrilled, but now I want to shout, “Dude, get the hell out of here before you get slimed!”

  Bosun’s Mate David Varela tells me he’s worked at the Bodega Bay Surf Station, on the cutter Boutwell out of Alameda, at Yerba Buena, and now with the strike team. In other words, he’s homesteading the Bay Area, and who can blame him.

  Turning into Richardson Bay, we pass a large blue and white skimmer ship, one of three that’s been collecting oil offshore. We pass our first injured bird, a western grebe that keeps bending its long, elegant neck to preen its oiled back.

  We pull up by the riprap shoreline below a steep cliff next to Bridgeway, the road into Sausalito. Seven of us scramble into the black raft, including two of the MSST guys, Marine Science Technician First Class Burt Wells, a tall fellow I’ve been out with before, and Port Security Specialist Third Class Sean Fadely.

  The team checks its handheld GPS, cameras, and note forms. Bruce says he has Richardson Bay divided into eleven segments to survey and we have four hours to do it in. We begin motoring along the shore and boom! The outboard hits a sunken rock. We pull over to a floating dock and lift it up to check the blades. They’re OK, so we continue on past the famous Sausalito waterfront and the statue of the seal with a live gull on its back. There’s a light sheen of oil on the water here, plus another oiled bird, then some patchy sheens and our first boomed-off beach. It’s 9:44 A.M. We go up the channel between Horizons and Scoma’s restaurants, then cruise past the ferry dock, which they eye as a place to stage cleanup equipment if they have to.

  We enter a few boat marinas and pass some anchor-outs with oiled bottoms. We pull up to the dock at Pelican Harbor, where the harbormaster, Janet Eri
ckson, tells us the oil came in Friday night and hit the anchor-outs and also the cliffs and pylons of waterfront homes across the way in Belvedere. The next harbor entry is boomed off, with some tar balls stuck to the absorbent boom material. We motor past several mega-yachts—Flipper, My Girl, Maximus 2—and a dead floating cormorant.

  There are some rafted timbers with a dozen harbor seals, pelicans, and a great blue heron hanging out on top of them, all looking fit enough to eat a fiddler crab.

  We enter the houseboat marinas and motor past the seaplane slip and under the Highway 101 bridge into the Sausalito canal and wetlands. We take a long looping look around the shallow lagoon and on our way out are waved over by a fireman who asks if we’ve seen any oil on this side of the bridge. We tell him we haven’t. Going back under the bridge and over to the Strawberry Peninsula, we flush an oiled cormorant, who flaps across the water and then settles back down warbling lovely calls of distress. The water sparkles like diamonds with the cityscape sharp as crystal across the bay.

  We pass the Audubon Center in Tiburon. That ends segment seven of eleven. Still, thankfully, the shoreline is largely unsullied.

  “Inside or outside of the birds?” Burt asks Bruce as we approach a flock of several hundred floating just offshore.

  “This is where we may see oil, so let’s head in toward shore even if we flush them,” Bruce says.

  “It’s for their own good,” I suggest.

  “It’s in their interest,” he agrees as our raft approaches and they take off in a great squawking and fluttering of wings, flying a lazy few hundred yards before resettling on the water.

  We do two more short segments and see some small floating tar balls. “No evidence of shoreline oiling,” Bruce notes. A few minutes later approaching the side of Belvedere facing Sausalito, we find two ribbons of oil left from high and higher tide lines running along the pilings of multimillion-dollar waterfront homes and the rocks in between. They remind me of the brown flood line that ran through the streets and neighborhoods of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The ribbons of oil two to four inches thick fade away just below the mansions at the end of the point where our 25-foot ride home is waiting. It’s 1:55 P.M.