Naked and Vulnerable Up and Down the Coast : Oil Spills: The Orange County slick was just the Little Big One. We should act now if we’re ever to avert a larger catastrophe.

Twenty-seven hours after the accident, after much talk of effective containment, the oil slick first rolled in, met by 25 hired workers with rakes and absorbent towels.

However well or poorly the Orange County cleanup effort fares from here, it is clear that the California coastline remains largely naked and vulnerable. It is dependent more on Mother Nature than upon any contingency plan for protection against oil spills.

And, to borrow a phrase born in the San Francisco earthquake, this is not the Big One, only the Little Big One.

This one, remember, is 1/35 the size of last year’s Alaskan spill and a tenth that of the Santa Barbara spill of 20 years ago. It occurred in “ideal conditions,” as a Coast Guard official observed. Not only were the waves and winds benign and the crew sober, but the spill took place just eight nautical miles from the only location of a cleanup team in Southern California.

I have visited the headquarters of that team, called Clean Coastal Waters, in Long Beach Harbor. I highly recommend it to anyone trying to penetrate the abstract technical arguments over how safe we are from spills.

The scene is this: Every year there are 2,500 separate tanker trips in and out of the harbor. The tanker captains are under no single traffic officer; the place is something like a floating freeway with each driver negotiating his own lanes. One tanker carries up to 23 million gallons of oil, enough, when refined, to power 1 million cars from here to New York. Or, to do damage that is hard to imagine until you hold a bird that has learned what it’s really like to be tarred and feathered.

Moored to a small dock in the midst of all this harbor-tanker traffic are four vessels that comprise our front-line defense against this slick. Funded and maintained by the oil industry, the flagship of the fleet is Clean Waters I, a 150-foot vessel carrying a skimmer and tanks of chemical dispersants. The other three boats are like large Boston Whalers. Glossy photographs show them bouncing through the surf alongside happy dolphins.

It took the Clean Waters team three hours to travel eight miles to the spill site. By then darkness had descended, and the crews couldn’t begin to really attack the spill until morning. Their equipment is designed to joust with a spill up to the size of the Orange County one. And even with “ideal” weather, the slick made the beach.

I asked Skip Olmstead, the commander of Clean Waters, whether he could fight a Santa Barbara-sized spill. “Impossible,” he frankly replied.

What about two smaller spills at the same time? A spill off San Diego instead of San Pedro? The current spill in serious winds? The answer would be the same.

The oil industry and regulators are surprisingly candid on this score. At a joint legislative hearing last year, I vividly remember two questions asked: Could an Alaskan-type spill happen here? Are we prepared? The straight answers were: Yes, it could happen here, even worse than Alaska because of our waves. No, we couldn’t fight it. Not soothing testimony, when even the Minerals Management Service predicts a 94% likelihood of a huge California spill in the next 30 years.

There is a pattern resembling fiction by Orwell or Kafka. Since Santa Barbara, the authorities have reassured us that lessons have been learned, that catastrophe cannot happen again because precautions have been taken. Then, when a new catastrophe nonetheless occurs, the authorities say it couldn’t be helped, they are investigating, whatever happened will be corrected, they are doing their best.

This bureaucratic mentality deserves the fate it received in Eastern Europe.

We Californians once again must take greater charge of our coastline. There are specific steps that can be taken:

--Require double hulls for tankers.

--Tankers and terminals can be required to have prevention plans approved by the state, with local participation.

--Tanker-traffic controllers, like air controllers, can be required in our harbors and shipping lanes.

--Better-equipped cleanup crews can be headquartered at the most critical points all along the California coast.

--A $500-million prevention and cleanup fund can be created to ensure that personnel are trained and that sufficient money is immediately available when disasters begin. A 25-cents-a-barrel fee would pay for it.

--Ban new drilling in state waters.

Proposals such as these are contained in legislation awaiting hearing in Sacramento and in the Environmental Protection Initiative proposed for November.

The key is simple: Put California in charge of maximizing its coastal safety and rely less on the oil industry. The current approach is a crude joke.