Chemists Help Determine the Cost of a Dead Bird
RANCHO CORDOVA, Calif. _ The bodies of the birds, seals and raccoons that washed up onto Bay Area beaches after the Cosco Busan spill were long ago packed up and stored in state-owned freezers.
But samples of their oil-soaked fur and feathers _ crucial evidence of a crime _ live on in the small Petroleum Chemistry Laboratory. Here they will help build a multi-million dollar damage claim against the owners of the container ship that released 58,000 gallons of oil after it rammed a Bay Bridge tower last month.
The financial settlement will pay for restored and replaced habitats, turning these creatures’ losses into gains for those that survived.
Chemists at the small concrete lab won’t discuss their investigations while the probe is continuing. But in what could be an episode out of “CSI: Wildlife,” they are making progress in painstaking comparisons of the unique “fingerprints” of oil samples _ one from the ship’s fuel tank, others from collected samples. The goal is to find a match.
“If we confirm a source, we have a responsible party,” said chemist Susan Sugarman of the lab, overseen by the Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) in the California Department of Fish and Game.
Scientific verification of the source of the oil is legally critical under a 17-year-old state law that holds ship owners responsible for damages to wildlife, habitats and recreational areas.
But the lab’s work is essential for another reason: Its tests of water and tarballs, when combined with field work, document the type and extent of damage done to pristine habitats.
A pricetag will be placed on these damages _ and will be the basis of a civil claim to be filed by OSPR against the Cosco Busan’s owner, Regal Stone Ltd. of Hong Kong.
“We’ll document the full impact,” said Stephen L. Sawyer, assistant chief counsel at the Department of Fish and Game. “And we’ll make sure that the responsible party pays what they should be paying.”
OSPR investigators don’t care about the cause of the accident, or whose fault it was. They aren’t seeking fines or penalties. Those are issues to be litigated by the federal government, city of San Francisco, fishermen, crabbers and others.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil suit against Regal Stone; the company that insured it, Shipowners’ Insurance & Guaranty; and the pilot, Capt. John Cota. In another action, the state’s Board of Pilot Commissioners issued formal misconduct charges against Cota, accusing him of negligence when on the foggy morning of Nov. 7, when he advised the captain of the ship to proceed under the Bay Bridge.
The job of OSPR is to enforce a tough law created by the state Legislature in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil in Alaska and the American Trader spilled 300,000 gallons of crude oil off Huntington Beach in Southern California in the late 1980s.
“The law is clear: You break it, you buy it. And you compensate for losses with restoration projects,” said Steve Hampton, an OSPR economist. “If you’re the owner, you’re responsible.”
At this point in the investigation, Regal Stone has accepted responsibility for damages to the state’s natural resources, said attorney Sawyer. It is also cooperating with cleanup and data collection.
“They understand their liability,” he said.
If Regal Stone goes bankrupt or its insurer does not pay, the state can turn to the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, created by a tax on the petroleum industry. The fund covers uncompensated cleanup costs and damages.
But how much will Regal Stone owe? That’s what still needs to be proven.
The foundation of that case is built from scientific data obtained by the Petroleum Chemistry Lab, which identifies the source of the oil and confirms which habitats were affected, based on sample locations. Lab results have a strong track record of standing up in court, said lab manager David Crane.
Economists will tally the costs of the cleanup. And they’ll calculate the impact to humans by gauging the effect of closed recreational areas, polluted fishing, even the lost revenues to historic sites such as San Francisco’s Maritime Museum.
The economists will add up the lost wildlife, based on counts provided by the University of California-Davis. The known death toll includes one California sea lion, one northern fur seal, one harbor seal, three raccoons and about 2,300 birds, including three endangered marbled murrelets. Estimated losses _ dead animals never found _ will be included in the equation. So will long-term harm, such as impaired reproduction in a fragile species.
Putting a pricetag on such losses is a tricky process. Birds like marbled murrelets aren’t for sale at the local pet store. So the economists work backwards, calculating losses based on the cost of restoring vast habitats.
“What will it take to restore that resource? Whatever that cost is _ that’s the measure of damage,” Sawyer said.
Some restoration projects might be as elegant as new or improved nesting habitat for murrelets, or as simple as a pen for pelicans. To compensate for recreational losses, the state could build new fishing docks or bike trails.
“The idea here is the responsible party doesn’t just clean up the spill and go home. They just don’t fix what they broke,” said economist Hampton. “They have to compensate for losses. And if the habitat takes five, 10 or 20 years to recover, that’s part of the math.”
The total cost of the spill won’t be known for a long time. In previous incidents, the OSPR portion of settlements have ranged as high as $10 million. OSPR claims resulting from the 1996 Cape Mohican spill in San Francisco Bay were settled for $4.63 million; a 1999 spill in Humboldt County spill ended in a $6.71 million settlement.
The value of one dead bird has ranged from $1,300 to $31,000 in various spills, based on the cost of restoring their habitats.
For the creatures killed by last month’s spill, the triple-locked freezers at the Petroleum Chemistry Lab are the end of the line.
But for the chemists, economists and lawyers gearing up for a long and complex investigation, the work is just beginning.
It could take up to five years to settle the Cosco Busan spill, Hampton predicted, noting that the state is still negotiating the payout for damages when the M/V Kure collided with a loading dock in Humboldt Bay, rupturing a fuel tank and spilling several thousand gallons of bunker fuel oil. And that happened over a decade ago.
The goal is to turn a tragedy into something constructive, Hampton said.
Until then, the surviving feathers, tarballs and water samples will stay stored in the lab’s freezers.
“They’re evidence,” said Hampton. “Until there’s a settlement, the lawyers say: `Don’t touch them.’”
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PETROLEUM CHEMISTRY LAB
The Petroleum Chemistry Lab was established when the Office of Spill Prevention and Response was formed in 1991, creating a multi-million dollar revolving fund to cover the costs of cleanups.
Its laboratory, often working with dissipated evidence and few clues, is credited with solving a string of oil mysteries. Among them: The lab’s work in 2001 and 2002 linked recurrent oil leaks off Northern California to the S.S. Jacob Luckenbach, a tanker that sank in the 1950s southwest of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The lab’s techniques rely on the fact that oil is a blend of hundreds of thousands of hydrocarbons. Oil can be identified based on the unique distribution of these compounds.
Lab technicians first dissolve samples in a solvent and then separate them into classes of organic compounds. They then employ a process called gas chromatography, which uses heat to vaporize the compounds into a gas.
The gas is then passed over an absorbent material in which trace pollutants can be detected in quantities of parts per million.
The next step, mass spectrometry, takes the results of the gas chromatography and passes them through an electric field, which sorts out molecules by mass.
This information is spit out in reams of graphs with peaks and valleys that distinguish about 33 different molecular signatures, or “bio-markers.” The chart acts as a sample’s “fingerprint.”
Scientists compare the fingerprints of the samples with the known agent, such as oil taken from a ship, to see if there’s a match.
The lab can also help exonerate those being blamed for a spill, avoiding responsibility for pollution they did not cause.
Sometimes, Sawyer said, boats dump their oily waste in the middle of a spill to save themselves the cost of proper disposal.
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