Schrag: Damage from Toxic Oil Spill Small Potatoes Next to Day-In, Day-Out Air Pollution from California's Major Ports

She's listed as being managed by a German firm; her home port is Hamburg, her crew is Chinese, the owner was identified as Regal Stone Ltd. of Hong Kong, but Hanjin Shipping, the South Korean company that had chartered the ship, said it had leased her from Synergy Maritime in Cyprus.

All that's pretty normal nowadays for an industry that works hard to keep accountability as murky as the fog the ship was in when she sideswiped the protective fender that protects one of the towers of the Bay Bridge.

When she hit the fender she became merely another example of a system that allows shipping companies to routinely spew great volumes of toxics into the air and water with minimal accountability or compensation to anyone.

After the allision, Hanjin issued a statement that since Synergy operates the ship and manages the crew, "Hanjin Shipping has no legal responsibility in this accident."

In a similar not-me disclaimer, Cosco, the China Ocean Shipping Co. said the ship "is not owned, managed, operated or chartered by COSCO Group or any of its companies."

So where does the name come from?

(If you're prone to paranoia, you'll also like to know that Cosco is owned and run by the Chinese government, but that's a whole other story.).

Given the volume of shipping in the Bay, the conditions in which it must operate – currents, channels, rocks, fog and the near-certainty that sooner or later there will be either human or mechanical error – some such accident was almost predictable.

The ship's pilot that morning, a man with 25 years experience in the Bay, had a number of "incidents" on his record, among them one in which his ship ran aground.

We may not know for months – if ever – exactly what happened on the ship's bridge the other morning. Given the poor visibility and the pilot's doubts about the ship's radar, why was the 68,000-ton Cosco Busan running at a hefty 11 knots? Why, indeed, wasn't the sailing delayed?

But important as those questions are, there are still larger considerations. In Oakland, Los Angeles and Long Beach, California has three of the largest container ports in the nation. Even if there never was another accident, we'd be paying the price.

Last summer, the Senate passed Senate Bill 974, state Sen. Alan Lowenthal's bill that would have imposed a fee of $60 for each loaded 40-foot container handled by a California port. The money – an estimated $350 million to $400 million a year – would go to finance major projects to reduce pollution and traffic congestion around the ports.

Lowenthal, facing a likely veto from the governor, agreed to withhold the bill until next year to allow time to deal with opposition from retailers and shippers and with demands from various entities for a share of the money. As those demands are negotiated, maybe improved capacity to respond to the Cosco Busans of the future should go on the list as well.

Peter Schrag is the former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. This article is published with his permission.