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Criminal probe opened in Bay oil spill

SAN FRANCISCO - The entire crew of the cargo ship that sideswiped a bridge, causing San Francisco Bay's worst oil spill in nearly two decades, were being held for questioning as part of a criminal investigation, a Coast Guard official said Sunday.

The Cosco Busan, which leaked 58,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil into the bay on Wednesday, fouling miles of coastline and killing dozens of birds, was being detained at the Port of Oakland by the Coast Guard. Crew members will be free to go once federal investigators have questioned them, said Capt. William Uberti, the Coast Guard commander for the bay region.

Darrell Wilson, a representative for Regal Stone Ltd., the Hong Kong-based company that owns the Cosco Busan, declined to comment Sunday on the investigation.

Uberti said he notified the U.S. attorney's office on Saturday about problems involving management and communication among members of the crew on the ship's bridge. This includes the helmsman, watch officer, and ship's master — part of the Cosco Busan's Asia-based crew — as well as the pilot, Capt. John Cota, among the most experienced of the seamen who guide ships through the bay's treacherous waters.

Uberti declined to specify what problems he reported to federal prosecutors. "It was just the way that everybody interacted" on the bridge, he said.

A call to the U.S. attorney's office for Northern California was not returned Sunday.

A preliminary Coast Guard investigation found that human error, not mechanical failure, caused the ship to crash into a support on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

The wreck left a gash nearly 100 feet long on the side of the 926-foot vessel and ruptured two of the vessel's fuel tanks, causing heavy bunker fuel to leak into the bay. The spill has killed dozens of sea birds and spurred the closure of nearly two dozen beaches and piers.

Investigators were focusing on possible communication problems between the ship's crew, the pilot guiding the vessel and the Vessel Traffic Service, the Coast Guard station that monitors the bay's shipping traffic.

A language barrier between the vessel's pilot, Capt. John Cota, and the ship's all-Chinese crew was not likely a factor in the crash, since the ship's captain and officers are required to speak English, officials said.

The National Transportation Safety Board arrived Sunday to launch its own investigation. The agency will look at everything from how fatigued the ship's crew and captain were to any mechanical or weather issues that may have been involved in the accident, said Debbie Hersman, an NTSB spokeswoman.

The NTSB's investigation, expected to take up to a year, also will examine the initial response by the Coast Guard and the company who owns the vessel, she said.

Hersman would not say whether the NTSB's inspectors would aid federal prosecutors, but did say her agency would cooperate with all parallel inquiries.

Meanwhile, the head of the Coast Guard defended his agency's response to the spill while pledging a full and transparent investigation.

"On the surface it would appear that we did everything by the book in this case as far as responding," Commandant Adm. Thad Allen told The Associated Press.

The Coast Guard has come under criticism because of a lag of several hours between when agency officials learned that the spill was 58,000 gallons — not 140 as initially reported — and when that information was given to local officials and the public.

Allen said that preliminary information suggests that it took time to figure out the extent of the spill partly because sounding tubes used to measure how much fuel is in the oil tank were damaged in the crash.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., have both called for swift and thorough investigations of the spill, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency.

Feinstein met with Coast Guard officials Sunday and said the system for responding to spills needed to be improved, especially communication with communities where toxic sludge began washing up on beaches shortly after the crash.

"There were a lot of unusual things such as weather, but that should not excuse this," Feinstein said. "It's clear that the cities around the bay should have been brought into this faster than they were."

Efforts to clean up the mess intensified over the weekend. The Coast Guard increased the number of ships to 20 from 11 to work on skimming the oil from the bay, said Petty Officer Sherri Eng.

More than 10,000 gallons of oil had been recovered by Sunday, and about 770 workers have taken part in cleanup efforts on the water and along beaches to mop up the damage — a job that is expected to last weeks or possibly months.

Rescue teams raced to save hundreds of seabirds tarred with black shipping fuel. At least 60 birds were found dead while 200 live birds were recovered and sent to a rehabilitation center in Solano County.

The National Park Service reported Sunday that thick balls of oil had been discovered on the pristine shoreline of Point Reyes National Seashore along the Pacific coast. The oil has put several sensitive and threatened species at risk, according to the park service, including western snowy plovers, brown pelicans and several seal species.