Watchdog on Deck : Marine Biologist Monitors Shipping to Prevent Oil Spills

When John Grant started out as a marine biologist, he imagined himself working in the kind of setting one might see on a Sierra Club calendar--quietly conducting shellfish counts on a pristine stretch of California coast.

Instead, 17 years later, Grant finds himself responsible for guarding sand crabs, pelicans, grunion and other sea creatures from oil spills in the Los Angeles-Long Beach region, a marine superhighway for tankers, cargo ships and pleasure-craft.

“I saw myself on the north coast doing abalone studies,” Grant said. “Not monitoring oil pollution here in the belly of the beast.”

Grant, 50, covers the local coastline for the Office of Oil Spill Prevention and Response, a new division of the state Department of Fish and Game.

With fuel spills in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach commonplace and state resources scarce, the work requires an aggressive, tilt-at-windmills type of person. By all accounts, that describes Grant, a bagpipe-playing former bouncer not known for pulling punches.

“He can be fearless,” said Kenneth Wilson, a Fish and Game biologist who has worked closely with Grant. “I could see John in a fight getting an arm severed, getting another arm severed, his legs severed, and he’d still lash you with his tongue.”

Grant joined the oil-spill office in April. His immediate priority is to prevent relatively small spills that occur often in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Grant said. Often, these happen as ships take on fuel from barges. Last January, more than 12,000 gallons of oil was dumped into Los Angeles Harbor as a barge fueled a South Korean freighter.

Such accidents kill large quantities of marine life ranging from plankton to pelicans. Grant said ship-fueling operations in Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors account for about one spill a week--often because barge hands fail to keep careful watch.

“Sometimes these (fuel barge) people just sit in the back of their boat during fueling,” Grant said. “Then someone will say: ‘You smell something?’ By the time they take a look, the boats are surrounded by the stuff.”

The solution, he said, is tougher enforcement: “We’re going to nail these guys,” Grant said.

Grant gained experience as a Long Beach-based biologist covering the coast from Point Conception to the Mexican border for the Department of Fish and Game. After a 300,000-gallon tanker spill off Huntington Beach in 1990 and a 21,000-gallon spill off El Segundo last March, he led state efforts to assess the environmental damage.

The information gathered in those efforts--centering on the pollution’s effects on clams, sand crabs and grunion--is being used for court cases against the companies involved, British Petroleum and Chevron.

In 1989, Grant had a hand in temporarily preventing the Exxon Valdez from being towed into state waters after the tanker lost 10 million gallons of oil in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

Exxon wanted to tow the vessel into a bay at San Clemente Island and remove giant steel plates from the crippled ship’s hull before proceeding to San Diego for repairs. But Grant argued that studies should first be done to gauge how the work might affect marine life.

His superiors backed him up and Exxon decided to cut away the plates in deeper, less environmentally sensitive waters.

“Fish and Game really took the lead,” said Jay Powell of the nonprofit Environmental Health Coalition, a San Diego group. “It was comforting for us to know that somebody in the state bureaucracy was being responsive.”

Grant will do more than damage assessment in his new post, created as part of the Oil Spill Prevention and Response Act, a 1990 state law prompted in part by the Exxon Valdez spill.

With a computer, he and two assistants are cataloguing key marine habitats from Point Conception to Dana Point, starting in Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. The information will be used to direct cleanups and more accurately assess spill damage to strengthen enforcement cases.

Grant is also developing projects to restore oil-fouled marine habitat and reviewing contingency cleanup plans with the Coast Guard and other agencies he will work with in the event of a spill. And given its port traffic, the Santa Monica Bay area could very well see an Exxon Valdez-sized accident, he said.

“There will be a big one here sooner or later. If we don’t plan for it, (it) would be criminal,” Grant said. “Just take a bad storm, a skipper not on the bridge, and bang, it’s in the water.”

Few doubt his resolve to prepare for such a disaster.

Grant, who describes himself as a “radical environmentalist,” was born in Liverpool, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father who moved with him to California in 1953. Tanned, bearded and wearing a gold earring in his left ear, he is certainly not the stereotypical pallid bureaucrat.

His wife, Colleen Doyle, said he has been “extremely enthusiastic” about everything he has done since she met him in the 1960s while he was a student at Cal State Sacramento, power-lifting and working as a bouncer on the side.

“If anything, I think he has probably mellowed, thank God,” said Doyle, a Los Angeles attorney.

Colleagues said Grant is not afraid to broach sensitive subjects with superiors, and can do so in an engaging way.

Shortly after Jack Parnell took over as director of Fish and Game in 1984, Grant told him of the longstanding frustration of department scientists at the agency’s lack of basic marine research.

Grant said he spoke to Parnell, a cattle rancher, in terms a rancher could understand. “I said if we assigned him to manage a herd, how could he do it without knowing how many cattle there were, how many of them were having calves, and how many acres of pasture there were?”