COSCO Busan pilot hearing delayed until September

COSCO Busan pilot hearing delayed until September    The bar pilot at the center of a November 2007 container ship oil spill in San Francisco Bay will not get a chance to win back his suspended state pilot license until September, a judge decided last week.
   During a prehearing conference last Thursday, Capt. John Cota asked for a continuance of the scheduled April 28 hearing. The administrative law judge hearing the case granted Cota's request, setting a new hearing date for Sept. 2.
   In asking for the continuance, court records show that Cota cited ongoing difficulties with 'obtaining admissible evidence,' a need for more time to resolve 'other matters,' and a desire to postpone the hearing in order that he may obtain a fair trial.
   The court estimates that the hearing, which is open to the public, will take 15 days to complete, with sessions starting a 9 a.m. each day and running four days a week until it is over. The court's schedule for the hearing is: September 2-5, 8-11, 15-18, and 22-25. The hearing is schedule to take place at the Office of Administrative Hearings in the Elihu Harris State Building, 1515 Clay Street, Oakland.
   Cota, a state licensed Bay Area pilot, was on the bridge of the container vessel COSCO Busan on Nov. 7, when the vessel struck the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, tearing a 160-foot-long gash in the side of the vessel and spilling nearly 59,000 gallons of heavy bunker fuel oil in the Bay. Several dozen beaches were closed following the spill and thousands of birds eventually died from contact with the oil.
   Through his lawyer, Cota agreed that his state pilot license would remain suspended pending the completion of the court case. Cota was asked by the United States Coast Guard to surrender his federal license in December, a week after the state's Pilot Commission for the Bays of San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun suspended Cota's California piloting license.
   In revoking Cota's federal pilot license, the Coast Guard said it believed that Cota was 'not physically competent to maintain the license.'
   Shortly after the Busan incident, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen said ' without singling out an individual ' that the cause of the incident was human error.
   Cota, with more than 25-years of experience as a Bay Area pilot, has had numerous run ins with piloting officials.
   According to state documents, Cota appeared before the state's Pilot Commission a handful of times throughout piloting his career. Most recently, Cota was reprimanded last summer following the grounding of a bulker near the Antioch docks in February 2006.
   'Capt. Cota had not realized that the vessel was going off track and did nothing to prevent it,' said the report on the incident last year.
   Cota also received a 'letter of concern' over a San Francisco Bay incident involving a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in 2003. In the ten years prior to that, Cota was also involved in several other incidents and before that had received counseling by commission officials on several occasions.
   Port pilots like Cota are government licensed and paid by the shipping lines through pilotage fees. Pilots board the vessels before they enter the harbor, or leave with the vessel and are picked up outside the harbor. Bay Area pilots, who average $491,000 a year, are able to give orders while piloting a vessel, but by regulation are still subordinate and can be overruled by the vessel's captain. The vessel's helmsman translates the pilot's recommendations into control inputs for the vessel.