Spill-response legislation vowed

Two California legislative leaders said Friday they plan to introduce bills next year to strengthen the state's regulatory oversight of private companies in charge of responding to oil spill disasters like the one that slimed San Francisco Bay last month.

Sens. Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento and Dean Florez of Shafter, both Democrats, promised the legislation following a committee hearing in which they and other members of the panel roughed up the leader of the state's oil spill response agency.

"We're going to have a legislative package that is going to seek to fill the holes that obviously exist in this process," Steinberg said in an interview.

Throughout the hearing, Florez repeatedly criticized the firm that led the effort to contain the oil spill for not sending a representative to testify.

Florez said in an interview that it should be the state's responsibility to oversee the responses of private firms such as the O'Brien's Group, which headed up the response to the Nov. 7 bay spill, and that he wants to see some legislation to that effect.

"We need to participate in this," Florez said of the state's authority, "so there is a way to structurally regulate this so we have control."

Steinberg, the chair of the Senate's natural resources committee, and Florez, who heads up the government organization panel, also called for creation of an independent commission to investigate the spill and make recommendations to the state on what it can do to improve the cleanup response. Steinberg called on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to create the commission himself by executive order.

The request for a commission was met with a polite rebuff from Schwarzenegger spokesman Bill Maile.

"We appreciate the senators' suggestion," Maile said. "However, the governor has already directed state agencies to conduct an aggressive, coordinated investigation into the cause and the response of the oil spill."

Maile said Schwarzenegger is working with officials at every level "to get to the bottom of what happened."

At Friday's hearing, which lasted 4 1/2 hours, Florez expressed frustration over not being able to question officials from the O'Brien's Group, the Brea-based private firm that performs emergency response services throughout the United States and Europe.

Officials at the hearing said it was the O'Brien's Group that acted as the lead responder after a 900-foot container ship, the Cosco Busan, sideswiped a support for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and dumped 58,000 gallons of bunker oil into the bay.

A man who answered the phone at the company's headquarters referred calls to two telephone numbers in San Francisco. Calls to the two numbers went unanswered.

Besides O'Brien's, the lawmakers took aim at the Schwarzenegger administration's Office of Spill Prevention and Response for not keeping itself fully staffed and for operating with a $17.7 million surplus, which Steinberg and others suggested would have been well-spent on improving its own preparedness.

Florez and two other Democratic panelists, Sen. Carol Migden of San Francisco and Assemblyman Jared Huffman of San Rafael, took turns pillorying the agency's director, Lisa Curtis.

The legislators felt Curtis did not have an adequate command of the details of the agency's workings, and they expressed particular displeasure when she could not immediately explain why responders failed to lay water booms to block the spill as it encroached on the environmentally sensitive Bolinas Lagoon.

Curtis also ruffled the panelists by saying she stopped reading newspaper accounts of the spill the day after Cosco Busan gashed itself on the bridge. The oil spill prompted Schwarzenegger to halt commercial fishing in the bay. His order was lifted Thursday.

Migden excoriated Curtis for adopting what the senator characterized as a "defensive posture" at the hearing.

In an interview, Curtis said she was too busy working on the cleanup to read the media accounts of the spill. "The best way to assess what was going on was to be present," she said.

As for the "booming" controversy at Bolinas, she ultimately told the committee that responders tried to block the oil at least five times but failed because "the currents were too strong."

Currents running in excess of 1 knot render the booms ineffective, Curtis said, and tides at the time made conditions at Bolinas "the worst they could possibly be."

Warner Chabot, the Ocean Conservancy's vice president for campaign strategies, said the spill presented the state with a "once-in-two-decade opportunity" to assess its prevention and response strategy.

Chabot said the private response companies "are operated by honorable professionals, but still in a very economically competitive marketplace."

Oil-bracketing booms and other "cleanup technology" haven't been updated in more than 40 years, he said, adding that the 1-knot problem hampering the Bolinas effort is pretty much always in effect in the bay as well as in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

A number of officials at the hearing ripped the boat operators and other officials for not sounding the alarm earlier. Chabot suggested a quicker response may not have helped the cleanup all that much.

"By hour six, game over," Chabot said. "You lost. The bay was toast."

Also Friday, the state Board of Pilot Commissioners announced the summary suspension of the Cosco Busan's pilot, Capt. John Cota. The summary suspension on the 26-year veteran bay pilot will remain in effect until an investigation into the incident is completed, a board statement said.

About the writer:

• Call Andy Furillo, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 321-1141.