Cosco Busan cleared to set sail

UPDATE: The Cosco Busan indeed did sail out of San Francisco Bay the morning of Thursday, Dec. 20. 

The cargo ship that spilled thousands of gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay in November is ready to set sail. The damage to the ship’s hull from when the tanker struck a protective barrier around a tower of the Bay Bridge has been repaired, and all legal and administrative measures that had kept the vessel from leaving have been cleared.

As of this writing, the ship appears to be at anchor south of the Bay Bridge, according to the SF Bay ship-tracking Web site BoatingSF. Earlier this morning the pilot boat Golden G8 pulled alongside the Cosco Busan, but high tide just inside the bay was at 7:30 a.m. and at the San Francisco bar (a big sand bar just seaward of the Golden Gate) it was at 6:55. The low tide this afternoon is pretty low — minus 0.53 feet at 2 p.m at the bar — so unless they leave soon, even if the Cosco Busan is empty of cargo it’s possible that the ship will not exit the bay until later. That’s just speculation on my part, though, as I’m not familiar with the shipping channels in detail.

The next high tide at the bar is at 9:02 p.m., then again Friday morning at 7:41.

Resources:

SF Gate story

KTVU bungles oil spill animal stories

S.F.’s Aquatic Park reopens after oil spill

Track the path of San Francisco oil spill tanker

Oil spill update November 9

Black death on the beach

KTVU bungles oil spill animal stories

KTVU continues its embarrassing misidentification of common Bay Area animals this morning.

OK, so to update this post for the record, the afternoon after this original post I saw a piece by Janine De la Vega on KTVU’s 5 p.m. news broadcast, and it was repeated (probably slightly modified, thought I didn’t see it) at 10 p.m. It was much better than the crab story, and much more in keeping with the station’s usually higher quality of reporting. De la Vega reported on the deaths of a number of seabirds and the near-starvation of others in the Monterey Bay area. She didn’t reach for any conclusions that weren’t supported by the facts she presented. The piece didn’t go as deep as I would have liked (there’s a much bigger story behind these starving birds with potentially huge environmental and economic importance), but it was nicely done as far as it went.

The impact on wildlife and the fishing industry following the Nov. 7 oil spill from the Cosco Busan in San Francisco Bay is one of the most compelling elements of media coverage of the story. While the fact that the impact runs deep and is likely to go on for a long time is bad for the Bay Area in general, for the media it presents an opportunity for some great work that’s not only compelling and informative for news consumers but also stimulating for the journalists producing it. It ought to give the television news a change from “breaking stories” about snow in Blue Canyon, at any rate.

However, many media outlets can’t seem to properly identify the animals they’re covering. In the days immediately following the Cosco Busan spill, nearly every local television news station showed footage of harbor seals lounging on shoreline rocks (I saw the group that hangs out near Point Bonita in the Marin Headlands most often) while inaccurately calling them sea lions.

Harbor seals and sea lions don’t look much alike unless they’re swimming fast and you can’t get a good look at them, and because they occupy different ecological niches they are likely to experience different effects from the oil spill. Confusing a harbor seal with a sea lion is like not being able to tell the difference between a duck and a swan, or even between a compact car and a pickup truck. Similar in some ways, sure, but not that much.

Nevertheless, there’s little harm in this elementary identification error. Neither harbor seals or sea lions are economically significant to the region, and both represent more or less the same “awww” factor for average viewers.

But this morning KTVU — normally my favorite local TV news source — took bungled animal identification to a new and journalistically unacceptable low.

S.F.’s Aquatic Park reopens after oil spill

San Francisco officials reopened Aquatic Park Wednesday morning, returning the popular waterfront spot to swimmers, boaters and tourists looking to get a little sand between their toes. Aquatic Park, on the city’s northern shore close to Fisherman’s Wharf and Ghirardelli Square, had been closed because of contamination from the Nov. 7 Cosco Busan oil spill.

I visited the area two days after the spill (see Nov. 9 post here), and went back this Wednesday to see how things had changed.

The first thing I noticed was that aggressive smell of petroleum that permeated the air nearly two weeks ago was gone. The string of yellow tape that had blocked access to the water had been taken down, and people strolled along the beach. The sun was bright, birds bobbed in the water and probed the rocks for food. I even saw someone swimming. In short, to a casual observer everything looked like it was back to normal.

But I wanted a closer look. I had timed my visit to take advantage of the afternoon’s low tide, since it was roughly the same as when I was there Nov. 9 and would provide an accurate comparison of conditions. I climbed down the seawall and examined the shoreline more carefully, and discovered that it still was easy to see rocks coated with oil. Municipal Pier was still closed, too.

In spite of the footage and photos of San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin swimming at Aquatic Park on Wednesday morning (is it me, or does it look like he’s really hit the gym since those pictures of the speedo-clad legislator appeared in San Francisco Magazine earlier this year?), I think the impact of the Cosco Busan is going to be with us for a long, long time.

SF Chronicle’s oil spill coverage shines

The San Francisco Chronicle seems finally to have figured out what to do with what in spite of several waves of layoffs is still a pretty fat newsroom, turning in very good coverage of the disastrous oil spill that hit San Francisco Bay last week.

When I was managing editor of the San Francisco Independent from late 2000 through 2003, and earlier when I ran the Independent’s neighborhood section, we regularly scooped the Chronicle on San Francisco news. The Chron and the Indy weren’t playing exactly the same game, so comparisons of the major metro daily with the three-day-per-week free paper are difficult. But it’s a fact that the Independent regularly scooped the Chronicle (and, earlier, the Hearst-owned Examiner), sometimes by months.

When the San Jose Mercury News timidly ventured into San Francisco in 2000 or late 1999 with a handful of people, we weren’t surprised that the Indy ate the Merc’s lunch. But the Chron had an enormous newsroom based right here in San Francisco — how was it possible for us to beat them? I’ve always said that if you gave me the right six reporters, this town wouldn’t know which ear to stand on, but it’s always been perplexing that the Chron seemed to mill about aimlessly with so many good reporters on staff and other resources on which to call. On paper, it shouldn’t even be possible to get a scoop in edgewise over the Chronicle.

But since Wednesday’s Cosco Busan spill, the Chronicle has really bumped up its game, using both old-school print skills and electronic tools very well.

One thing print still does much better than the web is the front page. That is, it can present, in a single combination of type and imagery, the *idea* of an event or story with instantaneous power that the busy pages of news web pages don’t seem to be able to muster.

In 2001, one of the most iconic images to emerge from the media following the Sept. 11 attacks was the San Francisco Examiner’s front-page photo of the burning Twin Towers capped by the headline, “Bastards!” Sept. 11 and the Cosco Busan oil spill are vastly different stories, of course, but just as the “Bastards!” front page captured the zeitgeist of the moment, so did the Chronicle capture the feelings of many people who love or live in the Bay Area with its front page of Friday, Nov. 9. The image by Michael Macor, which filled almost the entire expanse of the front page above the fold: the head of a surf scoter, completely soaked in oil, cradled in the hands of a Marin surfer who tried to rescue it. The banner headline: ‘Heartbreaking’.

But beyond the headlines, the Chronicle also has had very good ongoing coverage of the spill and its impact. I’ll update this post soon with links to specific articles and resources, but for now just check out the coverage at sfgate.com.

Track the path of San Francisco oil spill tanker

Watch the movements of the Cosco Busan, the tanker ship that crashed into the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled tens of thousands of gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay.

BoatingSF.com provides animations of ship and boat traffic in San Francisco Bay. This is always an interesting and useful service usually provided in real time, but they’ve very astutely responded to the interest in the San Francisco Bay oil spill by providing an animation of the path of the tanker that hit the bridge.

In the image above, the Bay Bridge is the line that goes diagonally from San Francisco on the bottom left to the East Bay on the top right, intersected by Yerba Buena Island. the port of Oakland is on the right. You can see the Cosco Busan — the tanker ship responsible for the Nov. 7 oil spill — as a small red arrow next to the bridge. It’s just about to hit the bridge’s protective bumper. The blue arrow next to the Cosco Busan is the tug Revolution.

Oil spill update November 9

San Francisco’s waterfront smells like an auto-repair garage.

After a disheartening visit to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach Friday morning, I went to Aquatic Park in the afternoon to see what things were like there. As my wife, my daughter and I approached the water, the smell was powerful and unavoidable. Unlike the familiar tarry smell of an old wharf on a warm day, this was a sharper, more pungent scent, reminiscent of visiting a dying car in the ward of a Mission District garage, surrounded by mechanics with solemn faces and purple gloves.

What we saw was both better and worse than the scene at Ocean Beach that morning. While at Ocean Beach I found four oil-covered birds in the space of an hour and a few hundred yards of sand, at Aquatic Park a great blue heron, a black-crowned night heron (I think) and a gull were all hunting a rocky reef exposed by the very low tide. It was encouraging to see them apparently unperturbed and behaving normally. But just a few feet away, the seawall and rocks closer to shore were black with oil. The oil on the surface of the rocks is one thing, but the spaces between the rocks are rich with life (an abundance of fish that surprises most people, crabs and other crustaceans, mollusks, worms, sponges, algae), as is the sediment beneath them. Oil in these places is unlikely to be recovered by even the most scrupulous cleanup, and the impact probably will be ongoing for decades.

Wild child no more

The Public Policy Institute of California, a prominent San Francisco-based think tank, has released a study that presents a sad and alarming picture of how many modern children view the natural world. Somehow, it seems, children are growing up so disconnected from the outdoors that they view it as alien and monotonous.

In a reverse sense, I can almost understand this. When I first moved to San Francisco, I was about 7 years old, and the city was quite a shock. I previously had been accustomed to spending most of my day outside, sometimes on the street where I lived but just as often roaming the fields or woods, either alone or with friends, only reluctantly returning home when it was time for lunch or too dark to see well. The majority of boys I knew did pretty much the same, and as far as I can recall, all the kids and grownups thought this was perfectly safe. San Francisco, on the other hand, was barren, dull, foreign and frightening to me when I first arrived. The bus woke me up every time it went by the house at night. There was only building after building after building — where *was* everything?

These kids must feel similarly disoriented when confronted with an actual wild place. But how sad for them to live in a bubble that other people have made, without even knowing what they’re missing.