Gulf Lessons Fresh for Bay Area Oil Spill Conference

Lessons have been learned from two recent two oil spills in the  San Francisco Bay but more improvements still need to be made, speakers said today at a conference in Oakland.
     
Jackie Dragon, the marine sanctuaries program director for Pacific  Environment, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco, said there are precautionary measures available to prevent oil spills that still aren't  being used.
     
Dragon said that unless the state requires and enforces tougher  measures, oil spills will continue to wreak havoc on the Bay.
     
Fred Felleman, an environmental consultant from Seattle who works with Friends of the Earth, said regulators should require pre-booming, which  is the process of surrounding vessels, facilities or dock areas involved in transferring oil.
     
Felleman said pre-booming is a simple preventive measure that can  minimize an oil spill and "give you the jump on it."
     
He said once an oil spill spreads, "the genie is out of the  bottle."
     
Dragon and Felleman were two in a long list of speakers at a  public forum called "Oil Spills in San Francisco Bay: Preparing a Better Response."
     
The forum, held at the state building in downtown Oakland, focused on two of the biggest Bay spills in the past three years: that of the Cosco  Busan container ship, which dumped more than 53,000 gallons of oil into the  Bay in November 2007, and the Dubai Star oil tanker, which caused an  800-gallon spill in October 2009.
     
Both spills killed birds and other wildlife and oiled beaches,  marshes, and other Bay habitats.
     
Speakers said the conference is timely, given the massive ongoing oil spill response in the Gulf of Mexico.
     
The event was organized by Pacific Environment and a coalition of  San Francisco Bay stakeholders called the San Francisco Estuary Partnership.
     
Scott Schaefer, the deputy administrator for the California  Department of Fish and Game, said one of the lessons his agency learned from the Cosco Busan spill is to involve local governments as soon as possible so  they know what's going on and can contribute their own assets to cleanup  efforts.
     
Schaefer said the state is also adding on-scene coordinators to  help get everyone on the same page in responding to oil spills.
     
Capt. Paul Gugg, the commander of the U.S. Coast Guard sector in  San Francisco, said, "We're much better off than we were before in terms of  networking and communications" than before the Cosco Busan spill.
     
"There are things we could have done better and the response to  the Dubai Star went better than the response to the Cosco Busan did," he said.