From the New York Times
Challenged by strong winds and tides, cleanup crews struggled Friday to contain an oil spill spreading in the San Francisco Bay as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for the area.
No stranger to natural disasters in California, the governor traveled to the Bay Area on Friday for a briefing on the status of the 58,000-gallon spill, which started early Wednesday after a 900-foot container ship rammed into a tower of the Bay Bridge. The ship was crippled, and oozed the oil that has closed 16 beaches and, at last count, killed more than two dozen water birds...
Fourteen local, state and federal agencies are now involved with the investigation, recovery and cleanup of the tanker’s payload, consisting of diesel fuel and dense oil used to power ships. But the cleanup effort has done little to blunt criticism aimed at those who first responded to the accident on Wednesday.
Initial reports of the accident suggested the oil spill dumped less than 200 gallons of fuel into the bay. City officials and the public did not learn from the Coast Guard about the true extent of the spill and its damage for roughly 12 hours...
More than 200 workers were trying to corral the spill or clean soiled birds on Friday. About 18,000 feet of collection booms have been floated around the bay to skim and soak up oil. Twenty teams of wildlife experts have been working to collect and clean oil-stained animals.
Yvonne Addassi, wildlife branch director with the California Department of Fish and Game, said, “We’re probably going to see a lot more birds coming in over the next few days; hopefully they will be alive.”
From SFGate.com - Around Bay Area, outrage at delayed response to oil spill grows
High-ranking California politicians and Bay Area residents angry about their oil-splattered beaches demanded answers Friday to why the Coast Guard took so long to notify the public of this week's huge ship-fuel spill and how the sludgy mess was allowed to spread so far.
Coast Guard officials acknowledged they had erred in waiting more than four hours on Wednesday to issue an advisory that 58,000 gallons - not just 140 - had spewed into the water after a ship rammed the base of a Bay Bridge tower, but they insisted their response was appropriate.
California's two U.S. senators, San Francisco's congresswoman, a host of state legislators and residents up and down the damaged coastline were not buying it.
"Something went terribly wrong," Sen. Barbara Boxer told The Chronicle when asked what she thought of the disaster response. "It was not handled the way it has to be handled.
"You are talking about the most pristine part of the country here. We value this ecosystem. This is what makes the Bay Area special. It's just unacceptable," said Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works...
As of Friday evening, 20,546 gallons of oil had been mopped up on the beaches and waterways by at least 15 crews on foot and 11 boats rigged up to "skim" the gunk into tanks. Lt. Rob Roberts of the state Fish and Game Department said the cleanup is "going to be awhile. We could be out here weeks, we could be out here months.
"This is a process that may go for years."
He said much of the muck will have dissolved into the water by the end of the weekend and will be beyond containment. The last big oil spill in the bay, a 40,000-gallon mess in 1996, took at least two years to mop up...
Throughout the day, the strong tides that race out of the Golden Gate tortured Marin County's beaches with coating after coating of oily sludge.
Along Rodeo Beach, two dozen hazardous materials workers in orange suits trudged around the sand shoveling gobs of black goo, mixed with beach sand, and putting it into plastic bags. A Caterpillar tractor toted away huge piles of the bags from the beach.
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