'The spill is not over'

The environmental price tag alone for the Cosco Busan oil spill is likely to exceed $5 million.

"Fifty-eight-thousand gallons can create quite a mess," said Steve Hampton, a state Department of Fish and Game resource economist, referring to the fuel oil spilled from the container ship that hit the San Francisco Bay Bridge on Nov. 7.

He also warned that the ecological fallout continues to mount five weeks after the accident.

"The spill is not over. Things are still happening," he said.

While public attention was fixed on capturing the oil and questioning why it fouled 164 miles of bay and ocean coastline, teams of state and federal experts -- biologists, economists, toxicologists and resource managers -- have been working to pinpoint the ecological damage.

Ultimately the ship's owner, Regal Stone Ltd. of Hong Kong, will be asked to pay for the impact, including damage to bird, fish and marine mammal populations; sensitive habitats, such as Marin County's Rodeo Beach; and human costs, such as loss of swimming and surfing at beaches closed by the spill.

No one involved in the calculations wants to estimate the cost because it ultimately will involve litigation between the public agencies and Regal Stone.

"The responsible party is watching everything we say," said Hampton, who heads Fish and Game's Natural Resource Damage Assessment program.

But he cited a 1996 spill of 40,000 gallons of fuel oil in San Francisco Bay as a comparable, but smaller, incident. About 600 birds were killed in the Cape Mohican spill, and compensation for environmental damage was settled at $3.6 million, according to Fish and Game records.

Adjusted for inflation, that settlement would come to $4.8 million today, and the Cosco Busan spill was "very much Cape Mohican's big brother," Hampton said.

Bird losses from last month's spill are far greater, with nearly 1,600 fatalities, including birds from endangered species, such as the brown pelican, Western snowy plover and marbled murrelet. Two declining species -- the surf scoter and greater scaup -- were hard hit by the oil, which affects the insulating capacity of avian feathers, causing death by hypothermia or starvation.

Some published reports have listed more than 2,000 bird deaths, but only 963 of the 1,798 dead birds sent to the Oiled Wildlife Care Center in Cordelia were visibly oiled, director Mike Ziccardi said. An additional 632 birds have died or been euthanized at the center.

But the count is incomplete, experts say, because many dead birds sank, floated out to sea, were eaten by scavengers or wound up on inaccessible beaches.

"It would be irresponsible for us to make a guess at it," said Melissa Pitkin of PRBO Conservation Science, a Petaluma-based nonprofit that is part of the oil spill assessment program.

Assessing the environmental costs differs from gauging losses to coastal businesses, said Randy Imai of Fish and Game. Crab fishermen and oyster farmers go through a separate compensation process often involving lawsuits to seek redress.

Officials say little, if any, oil remains in the bay and ocean, and crews have cleaned 113 miles, 69 percent, of the soiled coastline in five counties -- Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda and Contra Costa.

Sixteen beaches remain closed: eight in the East Bay Regional Parks system, two in Berkeley, two in Richmond, Angel Island and three beaches in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area -- Horseshoe Cove, Pirates Cove and Rodeo Beach.

Officials say some beaches could reopen next week.

"They did a very credible job of cleaning up. It looks good," said Patrick Ruttan, field supervisor with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Santa Rosa.

But state-of-art science is needed to assess the damage and calculate the cost of compensating for it. That effort includes:

Surgically inserting tiny radio transmitters in the abdomens of about two dozen surf scoters cleaned at the Cordelia center and released back into the wild.

Scientists will track the survival time, range and behavior of the surf scoters, comparing them with a "control group" of the marine ducks that were captured unoiled and also given the three-quarter-ounce transmitters, Ziccardi said.

Harvesting herring eggs about to be deposited in San Francisco Bay, including two prime spawning areas heavily soiled by the oil -- Keil Cove in Tiburon and Horseshoe Cove by the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Scientists have determined that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a component of fuel oil, cause deformities in herring, Rutten said. San Francisco Bay's herring are both a commercially harvested fish and a cornerstone to the food chain supporting larger fish, birds and marine mammals, he said.

Rodeo Lagoon in southern Marin County became another focus of concern late last week after storm-driven surf breached a sandbar, sweeping into the lagoon oil that had settled into the sand, Hampton said.

An endangered fish, the tidewater gobi, inhabits the lagoon.

"It's something we were hoping to avoid," Hampton said.

Another question is the spill's impact on the marbled murrelet, an endangered bird that feeds at sea and nests in old-growth redwoods, laying only a single egg a year.

Only three dead murrelets were found on the Marin coast, Hampton said, but given their population of about 1,000 and their slow reproduction, the spill could have a serious impact.

Two marine mammals -- a harbor seal and a northern fur seal pup -- are listed as oil spill casualties. Seals are less vulnerable to oil because their blubber protects them from the cold and is not jeopardized by limited oil contact.

Nonetheless, scientists will be monitoring harbor seal reproduction in the spring to see if the spill made an impact, Hampton said.

PRBO, formerly known as the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, frequently gets asked why the death of some birds matters, Pitkin said.

She said the answer is that birds are like the proverbial "canary in a coal mine," but present in virtually every habitat.

"They are a good indicator of the health of the ecosystem," she said.

In the Cape Mohican settlement, $800,000 was paid in compensation for about 600 dead birds.

Experts assessing the Cosco Busan spill ultimately will translate the ecological damage into the cost of appropriate restoration and rehabilitation programs, Rutten said.

"We have to demonstrate that an injury occurred," he said. "I have no idea (what it will cost) until we run the numbers."

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.