Lawmakers on Wednesday criticized the Coast Guard's response to last week's oil spill in San Francisco Bay, saying the agency failed to alert local authorities quickly enough and didn't deploy enough skimmers to keep the oil from spreading across the bay.

"There is no doubt in this case something went wrong," said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate Commerce subcommittee that oversees the Coast Guard. "Either the plan wasn't good enough or it wasn't a good plan."

Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard commandant who has defended his agency in recent days, acknowledged at Wednesday's Senate subcommittee briefing that the response was not adequate. He announced that he is replacing the commander who led the response, and within 90 days will make public the results of an investigation into what went wrong.

"It won't be the Coast Guard investigating the Coast Guard," Allen added, saying that other federal, state and Bay Area agencies will all be involved.

The Senate meeting was called by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., on such short notice it couldn't be listed as an official hearing and had to be labeled a "briefing." But the trappings were the same: a Senate hearing room where officials from the Coast Guard sat on the hot seat for two hours answering questions.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., described what she called a muddled response by the Coast Guard-led incident command. She said the division of responsibility among three groups - the Coast Guard, the private contractor dispatched by the ship's owner for the cleanup, and the state's Office of Spill Prevention and Response - slowed the response.

"It just seems to me there has to be one instant authority, across the board," Feinstein said. "Am I wrong about that?"

"No," Allen replied. "And quite frankly the Coast Guard is the authority. The unified command system is used routinely every day in this country. ... It works. The question is why it didn't work in this case."

Feinstein said she saw other flaws in the response to the Nov. 7 spill caused when the freighter Cosco Busan struck the Bay Bridge: Drug tests on the crew were conducted late, and the drug and alcohol tests for the pilot, John Cota, were carried out by members of the Pilot Association, his union, which she suggested was not an unbiased party.

Feinstein suggested that the Coast Guard should be given increased authority to police the shipping lanes, including enforcing speed limits, especially during foggy conditions such as existed when the ship struck the bridge. She pressed Allen on whether freighters with fuel tanks below the water line should be required to have double hulls to prevent future spills.

"That would certainly decrease the chance of a spill related to the fuel tank," Allen said.

Snowe said the biggest flaw in the Coast Guard's response was its failure to quickly determine the real size of the spill. Initial reports pegged the spill at 140 gallons.

"What kind of response would it have been if you had known initially it was a 58,000-gallon oil spill?" she asked. "I have to believe it would have been a totally different response."

Allen said some skimmers were deployed within about an hour, which he described as a quick response.

"The question is did they deploy enough and to the right places?" he said. "We need a detailed investigation to tell us whether that occurred."

Coast Guard logs show it wasn't until almost 5 p.m. - more than eight hours after the crash happened - that officials determined that 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel had poured from the freighter's tanks into the bay.

Deb Self, executive director of Baykeeper, an environmental group, testified at the briefing that the Coast Guard ignored reports early in the day from other boats that fuel was spilling out of a gaping hole in the side of the freighter. She said the decision to move the ship to two different anchorages only worsened the problem.

"Everywhere it went, it left a huge swath of some of the worst looking stuff I've ever seen," Self said.

Self said more of the oil could have been contained if the O'Brien's Group, the contractor hired by the ship's owner to clean the mess, had moved immediately to put a boom around the vessel. "The response was woefully inadequate," she said.

Boxer said she was angry that state and federal officials did not revoke the license of the pilot, Cota, who had four incidents on his record over the last 14 years, including running a ship aground near Antioch last year.

"Even though you know he had these problems you didn't take away his federal (shipping) license?"

Rear Adm. Brian Salerno of the Coast Guard said the state licenses pilots that operate in state waters, and his agency had no jurisdiction in this case.

"That doesn't make people sleep better at night," Boxer replied.

Boxer recommended lower speed limits for ships in the bay, especially in periods of dense fog. She also lashed out at the Coast Guard and the contractor for turning away offers of help from local cities and volunteers seeking to clean up the mess.

"The people who want to help can't help?" she said. "It's inexcusable.".

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