Assembly Panel Plans Hearing in Huntington Beach on Oil Spill

A California Assembly committee that reviews legislation regarding oil spills intends to conduct a hearing here to investigate last week’s tanker accident, committee members said Thursday.

“We will be holding a hearing, and we’ll want to talk to all the involved parties,” said Assemblyman Ted Lempert (D-San Mateo), chairman of the Assembly’s Select Committee on Oil Spill Prevention and Response Preparedness. “It’s only through a start-to-finish investigation that we can ever be sure exactly what happened out there.”

A Huntington Beach hearing, Lempert said, would likely be held “within a few months” and probably feature testimony by state agency directors as well as members of the ship’s crew.

Lempert’s vice chairman, Assemblyman Gerald N. Felando (R-San Pedro), seconded the call for a Huntington Beach hearing and said the committee would attempt to set one up as soon as it completes its current work, a review of the proposed Oil Spill Prevention and Response Act. That bill, which both Felando and Lempert support, would create several new oil spill control programs, as well as a $500-million response fund.

“We’ll want to call all the heads of the state agencies that were involved in the cleanup, and we’ll want to get a detailed review of what was done and when,” Felando said. Felando said he also intends to use the hearings to question participants in the cleanup effort about their performance, which he has sharply criticized.

Felando was particularly critical of cleanup organizers for not digging trenches along the surf line as the oil blew ashore. Trenches, he said, would have captured oil as it washed up on the beach.

“We’ve got a lot of yokels out there with napkins trying to pick this up,” he said. “It’s absurd.”

Peter Bontadelli, director of the state Department of Fish and Game, has acknowledged that some mistakes were made early in the effort to control the spill, some involving installation of booms to protect sensitive shore areas. But Bontadelli added that the booms were in place before oil washed ashore, and overall he defended the cleanup operation.