Drugs blamed in ’07 oil spill
Owners of the container ship that struck the Bay Bridge in 2007 and spilled 53,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay have filed suit seeking to shift some of the responsibility, and tens of millions of dollars in damages, to pharmacists who allegedly supplied dangerous prescription drugs to the ship’s pilot.
Pharmacists at a Longs Drug Store in Petaluma knew John Cota was a marine pilot but “recklessly and negligently’’ dispensed thousands of pills to him over two years, said lawyers for Regal Stone Ltd. and Fleet Management Ltd., owner and operator of the Cosco Busan respectively. Those pills clouded his judgment, dulled his responses and led directly to the collision, they said in the suit filed Friday in San Francisco Superior Court.
The pharmacy authorized the medications “despite its knowledge that such despicable conduct could result in catastrophic harm to the public,’’ the suit said. It said many of the drugs interacted with one another and should not have been taken together. The suit also cited the National Trans-
portation Safety Board’s finding that Cota’s use of prescription drugs contributed to his “degraded cognitive performance’’ while guiding the ship.
The suit, however, did not identify the drugs Cota was given, the doctor or doctors who prescribed them, the conditions they were meant to treat, or the amounts and timing of the doses.
The only such detail provided in the 32-page filing was an e-mail allegedly sent by an unidentified pharmacy employee to the Coast Guard, 54 hours after the collision, saying, “Check John Cota for prescription drugs. I can’t say more than that.’’
Lawyers for Regal Stone and Fleet Management have not been available to answer questions about the lawsuit. A representative of CVS Caremark, which now owns Longs, was also unavailable for comment.
The 901-foot Cosco Busan hit a tower of the bridge in a thick morning fog on Nov. 7, 2007. Heavy fuel oil reached the bay shoreline and ocean beaches in Marin and San Mateo counties and killed more than 2,400 birds.
The National Transportation Safety Board assigned much of the blame to Cota, a licensed pilot for 27 years. The board said he set sail in a fog that kept other pilots in port, failed to inform the ship’s captain of his navigation plan, misread the ship’s radar and navigation charts, and used medications that impaired his thinking. The board also said the ship’s operators had failed to train the crew adequately.
Cota pleaded guilty in 2009 to federal charges of causing water pollution and was sentenced to 10 months in prison. Fleet Management pleaded guilty to charges of pollution and filing false documents and was fined $10 million. Regal Stone and Fleet Management settled damage claims by federal, state and local agencies for $44.4 million last year, and have also agreed to pay $3.6 million to 120 members of the Bay Area fishing community.
The lawsuit argued that some of those payments, and others from still-pending claims, should be borne by the pharmacy that supplied medications to Cota. If the pharmacists had warned Cota about the drugs, consulted with his doctors or contacted authorities who approved his pilot’s license, the suit alleged, “the incident would never have happened.’’