Harbor Rules Aim to Keep Ships Afloat : Navigation: Big ships are sometimes only inches from grounding in Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. Port officials and the Coast Guard hope new guidelines widen the margin.

Port officials and the U.S. Coast Guard, hoping to prevent ships from running aground in the nation’s busiest seaport, have agreed on guidelines that specify underwater clearances for vessels in Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors.

Under maritime law, the guidelines carry no enforcement powers and are merely advisory for the masters of the 7,000 ships that call on the ports each year.

Nevertheless, maritime officials say the guidelines represent an important step in standardizing the policies of the two ports and in maintaining safety--a growing concern as ship movements increase and other ports experience accidents.

“It is an excellent idea,” Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Gary Gregory said of the guidelines outlining underwater clearances for ships as they cross the harbors, anchor or berth.

“We have taken the two ports and now have them operating on a level playing field so mariners will understand the guidelines,” said Gregory, chief of port operations at the Coast Guard’s marine safety office in Long Beach.

Added Michael Rubino, a Los Angeles Harbor pilot captain: “We have one of the safest harbors in the world. But we always can be safer.”

Ward Pierce, chief pilot for Los Angeles Harbor, said groundings in the harbor are so rare that he can not recall the last one. The groundings that have occurred were due to pilot error, he said, not inadequate guidelines.

“You can have all the rules and regulations in the world, but it won’t help you against stupidity,” Pierce said.

Nonetheless, officials said the guidelines will help to avoid ambiguities for pilots who guide vessels to and through the harbors.

And that is particularly important, Rubino said, in the aftermath of offshore accidents such as the Feb. 7 spill of 400,000 gallons of oil off Huntington Beach when the hull of the tanker American Trader was pierced by its own anchor in water too shallow for mooring.

“It’s not good enough anymore to say that just because we haven’t had an incident, everything’s fine,” said Rubino, who chairs the Los Angeles pilots safety committee. “People have said that other places too . . . and our objective has to be to increase safety without impeding commerce.”

Among other things, the guidelines establish a minimum underwater clearance of 18 inches for vessels anchoring at either of the ports. Previously, no minimum clearance was specified for ships anchoring at Los Angeles Harbor.

Last month, the narrow margins of clearance at which huge ships operate became evident when the Coast Guard looked into a report that the cargo vessel Ionicean Father almost grounded while anchored at Los Angeles Harbor for fuel.

Although the ship departed on schedule with at least two feet of clearance in about 42 feet of water, the 700-foot vessel would have had only inches of clearance from the sandy bottom if the ship had been delayed until the lowest tide, officials said.

“If she hadn’t gotten under way, she could have touched bottom,” said Gregory of the Coast Guard.

But Gregory and others emphasized that the port pilot guiding the Ionicean Father warned its master about the keel clearance and tides. The ship’s master, they added, also made it clear that he never intended to anchor the vessel for more than six hours.

And most important, they said, ships’ masters, with liability for their vessels’ safety, are loath to take even the slightest risk of navigating harbor waters that could prove too shallow.

“Do we like to see that happen? No. Do we let it happen? No. Does it happen? Probably, but very, very rarely,” Gregory said.

Even when masters do take risks, under maritime law the best advice of port pilots remain just that: advice.

“If there is less than one foot of keel clearance, it’s the pilot’s duty to notify the master,” Pierce said. “But if the master feels it’s safe, that’s his decision. The captain is in charge of the ship, not the pilot.”

Still, officials support the guidelines as, in Gregory’s words, “just plain good marine practice.”

The formal guidelines for clearances at anchorages, in channels and elsewhere in the harbors were developed by local port and maritime officials because establishing them by federal law would be so slow and cumbersome. Under the best of circumstances, officials said, a list of federal regulations for the harbors would have taken at least a year to enact--even longer if the proposals had met opposition.

Instead, the guidelines are in place at both harbors less than two weeks after they were developed by the harbors’ Port and Navigational Safety Committee, which includes port pilots and others. The guidelines have been sent to both harbor departments for final adoption.

“Groundings are never a problem until they happen, and we are trying to take all of the potential risk out of that occurring,” said Rubino of the Los Angeles port pilots.

“It’s our job to look ahead,” he said.