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Close to a Good Approach to Disasters : State should heed Coast Guard’s advice and pass emergency oil-spill legislation

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During the 17 months since the tanker Exxon Valdez slathered Alaska beaches with crude oil, California has known that the same thing could happen any day, anywhere along its own 1,200-mile coastline.

Now the plan that would come closest to giving the state some sort of organized protection against spilled oil is bogged down in the Assembly. After an already disastrous session, Sacramento seems determined to make it clear that there are no stakes important enough to keep it from drifting into gridlock.

The issue involves the liability for damages that professional cleanup crews would face if they accidentally caused harm to an innocent third party while they were mopping up after an oil spill.

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The oil industry is willing to pay 25 cents for every barrel of oil produced in or imported by California, up to as much as $150 million for a cleanup fund. The industry is even prepared to put its own national cleanup team, the Petroleum Industry Response Organization, at work in California.

But it balks at making the move until its response teams are exempted by law from liability for anything less than “gross negligence” while they cope with an oil spill. Roughly translated, that means failing to take the most rudimentary precautions.

The exemption being sought is already part of SB 2040, the bill imposing the tax and creating the cleanup fund that passed the Senate by the lopsided vote of 34-3.

Trial lawyers jumped in to argue that no cleanup team should be able to get away with dripping oil all over a bystander without the risk of going to court.

The Assembly, both seeing the justice of its position and responding to the exhortations of Speaker Willie L. Brown (D-San Francisco), himself a trial lawyer, is moving to take out the exemption.

Spin doctors working for the oil companies demand to know whatever happened to the concept of the good Samaritan pausing to do a good deed.

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Public relations specialists for the trial lawyers insist that the law should not protect oil-industry cleanup crews that might, for example, take such shoddy care of equipment that a hose would rupture and spill oil into otherwise clean water. Oil industry spin doctors say, “Aha, that would be a new spill and thus liable under the law.” And so it goes, in arguments that have drawn even environmental activists into opposite camps.

The Coast Guard argues that the crucial thing about any plan is getting boats and cleanup gear to a spill as fast as possible. Anything--including worries about liability--that slows the process is altogether secondary. The Legislature can surely write its way around this. But any compromise should start and end with the Coast Guard’s back-to-basics position.

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