Sarah Woods
Ecology of the San Francisco Bay
Crima B. Pogge
04/19-09
The Costco Busan Oil Spill
On November 7, 2007 58,00 gallons of toxic oil spilled into the San Francisco
Bay from a container ship when it rammed the Bay Bridge at 8:27am. This spill was
devastating and terrible and there were many flaws that were within this incident besides
the actual spill. The response team was slow to react and according to testimony by the
Marine Spill Response Corporation, the first clean up vessel with oil skimmers and
containment boom did not arrive at the spill site until 9:50 a.m.! There were many local
volunteers however once the response team set in motion and it was very apparent that
there was much “bay love” that flowed from the people that called this place home.
The state Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) requirements for
containment and clean up response by the shipping industry need to be improved upon.
For example, the minimum amount of containment boom required for deployment in the
first hour after a spill for a vessel the size of the Costco Busan is 600 feet. However, the
Busan was a 900 ft vessel and has much more boom than needed to surround the ship and
the miles of fouled waters along the path of the ship. OSPR said they had a plan to deal
with a wide variety of local contingencies including our bay winds and tides, but not for
fog which is so prevalent in San Francisco Bay. Fog has been the excuse used by the
Coast Guard and others for not knowing that the spill was much larger than the 10 barrels
originally reported.
