Last Wednesday, an oil-filled container ship struck the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, spilling 58,000 gallons of "heavy-duty bunker fuel oil" into the San Francisco Bay. It could have been much worse, and I guess everyone's lucky the ship didn't take out one of the bridge towers.

What intrigues me, though, is the way an intricate bureaucratic labyrinth has produced a system in which ultimate responsibility is non-existent. (An increasingly common phenomenon, which we see constantly in the form of banks being free to make business decisions with terrible consequences they never have to bear, because what big brother regulates, the big nanny state sister guarantees.)

For starters, the ship that hit the Bay Bridge was not even being operated by its captain. Port regulations mandate that ships turn the controls over to local pilots. Yet even though he has no control over his ship, the captain is still "responsible":

Even the newest and largest ships, however, depend on the skill and judgment of pilots and ship officers. In the bay, a pilot gives orders to the helmsman. While the captain has the ultimate responsibility, the pilot has control.

Cota's [that's Capt. John Cota, the previously and repeatedly reprimanded bar pilot] job was to take an 810-foot-long ship, displacing 65,131 tons, between two support towers of the Bay Bridge. The channel is 2,210 feet wide. The ship is 131 feet wide.

The ship has a steel hull. Like all freighters, it has a single hull. Only tankers have double hulls.

Cota has been before the Pilot Commission for the Bays of San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun, a state regulatory agency, several times in his career.

In his most recent incident, he was reprimanded in July 2006 after an investigation showed that he had allowed the bulk freighter Pioneer to move out of the channel and run aground when it was approaching a dock at Antioch in February 2006.

According to records of the Pilot Commission, "Capt. Cota had not realized that the vessel was going off track and did nothing to prevent it."

He also received a "letter of concern" for an incident involving a small Navy aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay in 2003.

Cota was involved in four other incidents dating to 1993. Before that, Moloney said, Cota was "counseled" by commission executives a number of times.

Cota works in a system that is both tightly regulated - all pilots, for example, must go through exhaustive licensing and training procedures - and extremely complex, especially when it involves foreign ships.

Naturally, I find myself wondering what it might take to fire one of these government employees. (Despite all his power, President Bush couldn't even fire the incompetent paper pushers who gave visas to Mohamed Atta and company, so they were "reassigned." That's the way the "system" of "responsibility" works. "The buck stops here" is a bit like "the age of big government is over," "I am not a crook," "I did not have sex with that woman" and other classics....)

Putting myself in the "real" captain's position, the whole thing really sucks. Imagine being completely responsible for things which are legally beyond your control. Who would take such a job? I'd demand backup. And backup there is -- all the way to.... To where? Oh, who knows? Because of infinite government regulation compounded by infinite litigation, there's no way to tell who owns these ships:

The Cosco Busan has had two names and has sailed under at least two flags since it went into service in 2001.

An experienced San Francisco admiralty lawyer, who did not want to be named because he has many clients in the shipping world, said ships and their owners and operators sometimes cloak themselves with dizzying layers of paperwork "to avoid liability. If you can't find who owns it," it is more difficult to file a lawsuit.

Hanjin Shipping, which is chartering the Cosco Busan, said in an e-mail Wednesday that the vessel is owned by a company it identified variously as Synergy Maritime Ltd. or Synergy Marine Ltd., of Cyprus.

Raajeev Singh, technical manager for Synergy, said the ship was run by a ship management agency in Hong Kong, whose name he did not provide.

A woman who answered the phone at Synergy in Cyprus referred queries to Darrell Wilson, a spokesman for MTI Network in Stamford, Conn., which handles "crisis management" for the shipping industry.

Wilson said the ship is owned by Regal Stone Ltd. of Hong Kong, managed by Fleet Management Ltd. of Hong Kong, and its crew and technical support are provided by Synergy Management Services.

Asked about financial liability, Wilson said, "Regal Stone is stepping up to the plate."

Finding the owner of the ship - or finding who, if anyone, is liable - can be so difficult that sometimes it's "hard to get jurisdiction over the actual owner or even figure out who they are," the admiralty lawyer said.

I thought of responsibility in another context when I read in today's news that the "West Memphis Three" (three young men convicted in a "Satanic ritual killing" in the mid 1990s) have apparently been exonerated by DNA evidence, and that they may be freed:

ATLANTA, Oct. 29 -- In 1994, three teenagers in the small city of West Memphis, Ark., were convicted of killing three 8-year-old boys in what prosecutors portrayed as a satanic sacrifice involving sexual abuse and genital mutilation. So shocking were the crimes that when the teenagers were led from the courthouse after their arrest, they were met by 200 local residents yelling, "Burn in hell."

But according to long-awaited new evidence filed by the defense in federal court on Monday, there was no DNA from the three defendants found at the scene, the mutilation was actually the work of animals and at least one person other than the defendants may have been present at the crime scene.

Supporters of the defendants hope the legal filing will provide the defense with a breakthrough. Two of the men, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, are serving life in prison, while one, Damien W. Echols, is on death row. There was no physical evidence linking the teenagers, now known as the West Memphis 3, to the crime.

And now it turns out that "animals" did it? Well that's no fun for the hysteria machine, is it?

Hey, maybe it was killer pit bulls that did it!

Forgive my cynicism, but I've been treated to so many sexed up news stories and so much manufactured public hysteria that I honestly don't know what to expect next.

Especially in case that's been around as long and written about by as many people as has the West Memphis Three, there is no accountability, and no responsibility. Even the Wiki entry has become a hotly contested (and largely incomprehensible) war of words. Prosecutorial careers rise and fall with such cases.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who will blame the "climate of violence" for the crimes -- perhaps the climate of irresponsibility itself.

We are all responsible. Well all crashed the tanker and we all Satanically mutilated the children. Or we might as well have.

Which means that after the moral lecture is over, we're all off the hook!

(But does that mean we all have to go down with the ship anyway?)