The last of the Cape Mohican — 1996 oil spill ship leaves bay
Infamous military barge carrier sailing to Texas to be scrapped
With no fanfare and few people realizing, an infamous chapter in Bay Area environmental history has closed. Or rather, sailed away.
The Cape Mohican, an 873-foot-long military cargo ship that was involved in one of the biggest oil spills in San Francisco Bay in the past half-century, was towed from its longtime berth at the Port of Oakland and under the Golden Gate Bridge on Friday.
By Wednesday, it had reached Mex
ico, attached to a tugboat with a steel cable as thick around as a beer bottle and chugging along at 7 mph en route to the Panama Canal, then Beaumont, Texas, by Aug. 1, and probably not long after, to a final date with the shipyard in Brownsville to be broken down and recycled.
The hulking 50-year-old vessel, a gray barge carrier that stretches as long as the Transamerica Building laid on its side, saw service in the Persian Gulf War.
But its claim to fame — or infamy — occurred on Oct. 28, 1996, when a worker at a dry dock in San Francisco near Pier 70, just south of the present-day Giants’ ballpark, mistakenly opened a valve on the ship thinking he was releasing water. Instead, 96,000 gallons of heavy black bunker oil poured out. About 40,000 gallons of oil flowed into San Francisco Bay.
Windy weather and an early season rainstorm spread it quickly. The spill blackened miles of shoreline on Alcatraz and Angel islands, drifted as far north as the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and washed up on beaches from Point Reyes National Seashore to Half Moon Bay.
“It was a horrible feeling to witness the pollution,” said Mary Jane Schramm, a volunteer at the time with the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. “You would step in an area on the beach that looked clean, and there would be a pool of oil. Your shoes were ruined. There was so much just barely under the sand.”
Even though the spill was modest in size compared with massive spills such as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, which dumped 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s pristine Prince William Sound, the damage was significant.
Nearly 600 birds, including grebes, gulls, loons and brown pelicans, were found dead and covered with oil. Thousands more were coated but could not be captured or recovered.
The spill polluted eel grass beds in the bay, where herring spawn every year. At least a dozen harbor seals were seen covered in oil. Oil spread to marinas, piers and seawalls along San Francisco’s waterfront. Altogether, investigators reported that 120 miles of shoreline were polluted with oil slicks and tar balls.
The spill was the largest in San Francisco Bay since 1988, when 432,000 gallons of crude oil leaked from a failed storage tank at Shell’s Martinez refinery into a creek and marsh and then into the bay. It would be 11 years until another spill as big hit the bay, in 2007 when the Cosco Busan, a cargo ship, hit the Bay Bridge in fog, dumping 53,569 gallons of bunker fuel into its waters.
“You rarely encounter something that large and that immediate. It was kind of shocking,” said Michael Lozeau, an Oakland attorney who was executive director of the environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper during the 1996 spill.
The ship is now near the end of its life.
Technically, the United States Marine Administration, a branch of the Department of Transportation, which owns the ship, says its status has been downgraded. For years, the Cape Mohican was part of the nation’s Ready Reserve Force, a group of cargo ships that can be put into service in wars. Now it is “in retention,” a type of retirement for older ships in which they are sealed and anchored without a crew, often waiting to be recycled.
“She’s heading to basically be scrapped. It’s too expensive to maintain,” said Sal Mercogliano, a naval historian and professor of history at Campbell University in North Carolina.
Steamships like the Cape Mohican have been replaced by diesel ships, he noted. The vessel was designed to carry barges that could be loaded with ammunition or artillery shells. But that technology has been replaced by container ships, he said.
Some congressional leaders, including Rep. John Garamendi, D-Davis, have been pressuring the Defense Department to replace the older cargo ships more quickly.
“There’s a concern that if there is a conflict, how would we get military equipment and supplies — the beans, the bullets, the gasoline — to the troops?” Mercogliano said.
After the oil spill damage was tallied, the Marine Administration and San Francisco Dry Dock Inc. settled the case in 1998 for $8 million. About $4.3 million went to reimburse state and federal agencies for the oil cleanup.
Another $3.6 million was put into a fund, overseen by the National Park Service and other agencies, for environmental restoration.
Over the the next decade, that money paid for a dozen major projects around the Bay Area, from removing trash and invasive plants at Crissy Field in San Francisco to restoring nesting habitat for auklets, petrels and other birds on the Farallon Islands to building new stairways and trails for hikers on Angel Island.
With tougher laws requiring double hulls for oil tankers and more training for crews, the number of oil spills from ships in California has declined in recent decades. But there’s always a risk, experts say.
“People have forgotten how bad it can get it,” said Ed Ueber, former superintendent of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. “Those big ships are run by humans. I was an officer in the Merchant Marine. I know people make mistakes.”