By now, everyone out here is abuzz with the news that the Cosco Busan struck one of the support stanchions of the Bay Bridge on Wednesday and dumped 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the water. Ideally, that buzz would have accompanied a fast response to the spill itself on Weds, but many folks are disappointed with the Coast Guard and the private contractors the state uses to do emergency response.

Thursday we heard from fishermen that their boats were coming in with broad black stripes of oily fuel along the waterline. The tides and currents in the bay are so complex and vary with the winds that keeping track of the oil has been difficult, and it's shown up in surprising places. A few pieces of information I've picked up:

• For Bay Area residents, if you find an oiled bird, call the Oiled Wildlife Care Network at 1-877-823-6926. There's also a flickr group for photos of the spill
• SFSU has used data from various parts of the Coastal Ocean Monitoring System to model the possible trajectory of the spill. This is a fairly large Quicktime file.
• It's not just birds but fish as well. With a low estimate for this year's herring population, oil in Richardson Bay could wipe out the fish and the fishery, due to start next month. Dungeness crab boats may vote to start their fishery late and fishermen are worried about the impact of the toxic oil on baby crabs in the bay.
• As the SF Chronicle found out, the international maritime laws make it very hard to track down who actually owns the ship and thus who might be responsible. COSCO Container Lines Americas ("Experience/Quality/Service: that's what makes COSCO your choice of carriers') now states on its home page that the spill ships was not ownerd or operated by any of its carriers.  You can change a ship's name, flag, and ownership with a few strokes of a pen, which is a long-standing problem for prosecuting illegal fishing, not to mention oil spills. William Langeweische's book "The Outlaw Sea" is an excellent read on the no man's land of big ships on the high seas.

Finally, just as with other natural disasters, the take-home lesson is to be prepared. Which does make me want to sing that song about Boy Scouts, but here we're talking not only about getting booms in the water faster bit also keeping the oceans healthy so they can survive events like oils spills. It's one thing to have a population of 100,000 herring when disaster strikes, and another altogether to have only 2,000 fish.