I was sitting around at work the other day when one of my co-workers asked me if I’d heard that a tanker had struck the Bay Bridge. I said I hadn’t and, with the memories of the 35-W bridge collapse in Minneapolis fresh in my mind, I asked if there was any damage to the Bridge. “No,” he replied, “but I guess there was a minor oil spill. Something like 150 gallons, so not too bad. Best to avoid the beach for the next few days anyway just to be safe.”

Now, I’m a man of many hobbies, but hanging out at the beach is definitely not one of them. I’m pasty by design, and I like to keep it that way thank you very much. Plus, do you know how hard it is to mix a good appletini with sand in the shaker? It’s a nightmare! Anyhoo, I didn’t figure that avoiding the beach would be a problem, so I promptly forgot about it and went back to thinking about more creative ways I can sell out to the establishment.

Well, it turns out that the initial estimate of 150 gallons spilled was a wee bit off. Just a smidge, though.

Um… what? Fifty-eight thousand?! Did they forget to carry the five or something? I mean, I’m not a math person, but that’s like four times as much!

It’s a whole fuck of a lot. And it turns out that it’s doing some really nasty things to the SF Bay ecosystem.

Those swirling questions include the obvious one alluded to above. Namely, why on earth was the initial leakage estimate so much lower than it turned out to be?

In other words, it took them almost 12 hours to release the information to local authorities that the biggest ecological disaster in over a decade had just happened in the San Francisco Bay. Meanwhile, they were telling everyone “no biggie.” And why?

Ok then. So in addition to making sure the Coast Guard responds to problems of this scale more quickly, we need to get them a better PR guy. That much is clear.

While the Coast Guard and local environmental organizations have begun a frantic race to clean up the oil as quickly as possible and minimize damages, state and local officials are pretty righteously pissed off.

The question of who is ultimately responsible could be more difficult than you’d think. The ship’s pilot, John Cota, was tested for drugs and cleared. Of course, he wasn’t tested by the Coast Guard until 24 hours after the spill (apparently the Coast Guard was kind of busy or something) so who knows how accurate that test was. Moreover, the dude doesn’t exactly have a spotless safety record.

To be fair to Cota, Wednesday was a heavy fog day. Of course, we have heavy fog days all the time around here. They’re so common that one could even call S.F. “Fog City” if one were so inclined. Or he might just not have known that the Bay Bridge was there. It’s only been up for 70 years. He might have been working off an old map. It could happen.

Even if they find that Cota personally was not at fault, that won’t necessarily relieve the owners of the ship from liability for the accident. The problem is that actually locating these owners is often difficult. That's because the owners of these ships often bury themselves in so many layers of sub-contracts and chartering agreements that it becomes a tangled mess of jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, the tales of damage done to wildlife, particularly migratory birds, are heartbreaking. Beaches have been closed to the public as rescue workers scramble to pick up as many live birds as they can before they are killed by the toxic sludge in their feeding areas.

If nothing else, it’s an ecological tragedy with a sense of timing, and not just because our state is trying to kill us. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to review a $2.5 billion punitive damages award against Exxon for their inhumanly reckless and reprehensible conduct leading up to the 1989 Valdez spill. The Court took up not only the question of whether the award was unconstitutionally excessive, but also whether Exxon should have to pay punitive damages at all. Awesome. Wouldn’t want to punish someone for practically criminal conduct leading to the worst ecological disaster of the modern era, would we?

Luckily, the S.F. situation is nowhere near the level of the Valdez spill (which pumped an astonishing 11 million gallons of crude into the Alaska shoreline), but it’s still going to take a whole lot of work to get under control. Hopefully, the Coast Guard isn’t too busy to see things through.