October 19, 2004
By ERIC NALDER AND LISA STIFFLER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS
The Coast Guard has obtained oil samples from about a dozen sources, including ships and barges, in its search for the vessel that spilled oil in Dalco Passage near Tacoma's Commencement Bay last week.
Coast Guard inspectors in Alaska boarded four ships, including two container ships that arrived in Anchorage on Sunday, maritime officials said yesterday.
A South Korea-bound container ship also was required to make an unscheduled stop Saturday in Dutch Harbor to give a sample, and an oil tanker that arrived during the weekend in Valdez was checked, the officials said.
Two tug and barge companies also gave samples from barges that provided bunker fuel to two of the container ships that were in Tacoma's harbor last week.
The Coast Guard issued one subpoena to get information from an unnamed party, said Coast Guard spokesman Jeff Pollinger. The rest of the samples were obtained voluntarily.
Some of the samples already are being prepared at a Coast Guard laboratory in Connecticut for final analysis by a lab in Manchester run jointly by the state Ecology Department and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Technicians will use "oil-fingerprinting" techniques to try to match the samples with the oil spilled in the water, said Wayne Gronlund, who manages the Groton, Conn., lab.
Collecting samples from a wide range of vessels is common in spill investigations "so you can either rule them in or rule them out," said Gronlund.
Some of the ships were not in the right place at the right time for the spill, but they were targeted, anyway, because they were in the Tacoma port at the time of the incident, according to the ships' representatives.
While the hunt for the mystery polluter goes on, efforts to cleanse about two dozen miles of fouled shoreline in South Puget Sound are winding down. Wind, waves and a fleet of skimmers have combined to help reduce the threat from the spilled oil, officials coordinating the cleanup said yesterday.
The oil-extracting boats have been docked, and the effort is shifting to cleansing shorelines with absorbent "pompoms."
The good news: The toll on marine mammals and seabirds appears to be low. An oiled Western grebe is recovering, and no more injured birds or beasts have been rescued, officials said.
The Coast Guard's search for the culprit has led to a short list of ships that passed through Dalco Passage.
The Horizon Tacoma, a 679-foot-long container ship that regularly carries supplies to Alaska and returns to Tacoma with seafood, was in the area of the spill shortly before it was first reported, records show.
The Coast Guard boarded the ship to take a sample and examine documents shortly after it arrived in Anchorage at 7 a.m. Sunday, said Marv Buchanan, marketing director for the Alaska division of Horizon Lines.
Buchanan said his company's examination of the ship indicates it wasn't involved in any spill. Coast Guard records show the Horizon Tacoma was involved in investigations of seven discharges of oil between March 1992 and October 2002, but Buchanan said they were minor incidents.
He said the accumulated amount of oil spilled was less than 3 gallons, and all of it was hydraulic oil from deck machinery that repeatedly leaked. The machinery has since been altered "at great expense" so that it uses non-polluting vegetable oil, Buchanan said. He said the spills were self-reported.
Five Coast Guard inspectors boarded the 800-foot-long container ship North Star about 2 p.m. Sunday in Anchorage. The North Star was nowhere near the vicinity of the spill when it occurred, said Phil Morrell of Totem Ocean Trailer Express, which owns the ship. It left the port of Tacoma more than an hour after the spill was discovered.
Inspectors boarded the North Star five hours after it arrived in Anchorage. Morrell said one inspector told him, "We are not here accusing you, we don't have reason to believe it was you."
The Hyundai Kingdom, a 300-foot-long container ship that departed Tacoma Wednesday afternoon, was diverted on Saturday, en route to South Korea, to stop in Dutch Harbor to surrender its oil sample, said Frederick Tse, marine operations manager for Hyundai American Shipping Agency in Tacoma.
The Polar Texas, an oil tanker that also left Tacoma on Wednesday afternoon, was boarded for samples when it arrived Sunday in Valdez, said Rich Johnson, a spokesman for parent company ConocoPhillips.
Ecology Department officials yesterday said most of the spilled oil has washed ashore, with a small patch remaining in Olalla Bay, west of Vashon Island on Colvos Passage.
Efforts to skim the oil off the water with skimmers have stopped and the vessels are being decontaminated. Cleanup crews are walking the rocky, sandy beaches to find oily "hot spots," stringing out pompoms to mop up the mess.
"The natural work of tides and waves, coupled with the absorbent boom, is what we are using to remove the oil from the beach environment," said Ecology Department spokesman Larry Altose.
Officials are sticking with an estimated spill volume of 1,000 gallons, but that figure "is undergoing an evaluation," Altose said.
Spill experts say the calculations are tough to make.
"It's really difficult to estimate how much is out there by looking at it," said Glen Watabayashi, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"There are too many variables," he said. "You don't know the thickness of the oil that you're looking at -- it varies. And the coverage is not uniform. There are patches where the water's clean or there are patches that are rainbows ... and it's moving and you've got stuff on the beach that you've got to take into account."
After the discovery of the spill early Thursday, the oil quickly spread to the Tacoma Narrows, up Colvos Passage and offshore from West Seattle's Alki Point. Damage was greatest on the southern ends of Vashon and Maury islands, including beaches and tidal areas important for spawning fish and migratory seabirds.
The cost of sopping up the spill has topped $1 million so far, with more than 90 percent of the tab being picked by the federal government. Criminal penalties for spilling the fuel and leaving the area without reporting the mishap could be up to three times the cleanup costs.
That's not all that the mystery polluter will have to pay. Officials are trying to put a price tag on the spill's biological damage.
So far, one oiled Western grebe, a seabird, has been rescued. A seal pup with a patch of oil was found and has since died. Two other dead pups that weren't oily also were found. All the deaths are being investigated by federal scientists.
But there can be more widespread, subtle damage. Scientists looking at potential impacts to fish and shellfish are measuring the contamination in the water and sediment.
The state has its own program to penalize polluters for environmental damages. State officials determine the amount and kind of oil spilled and weigh other factors, such as where the spill happened. Then they charge the polluter using a sliding scale that tops out at about $50 a gallon.
"It's this really interesting idea that wildlife has an inherent value and that's what's being compensated for," said Tom Leschine, director of the School of Marine Affairs at the University of Washington. "Is $50 a gallon a right amount? It's very difficult to assess damage in the marine environment."
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