[A-List] Oil spreads; 6 still missing

[Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxx>]

Oil spreads; 6 still missing
As hope fades for Selendang Ayu's lost crewmen, focus turns to 500,000
gallons of oozing fuel


Families welcome rescue crews home

By DON HUNTER, JOEL GAY MEGAN HOLLAND and TATABOLINE BRANT
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: December 10, 2004)

Thousands of gallons of oil gushed from a broken freighter and fouled
Unalaska Island beaches Thursday as hope dwindled for six of its crew who
were lost the night before in the crash of a Coast Guard rescue helicopter.

Daylight brought calmer seas to the rugged, rocky west shore of Unalaska,
but revealed an ugly sight: A thick sheen of oil spreading hundreds of yards
from the two halves of the vessel in all directions.

Responders flying over the scene Thursday saw what they thought looked like
two dead cormorants.

Rear Adm. Jim Olson, the Coast Guard commander in Alaska, said at a
late-night press conference that the agency believes the freighter was
adrift for about 13 hours before its crew notified the Coast Guard they were
in trouble. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the
freighter's grounding.

Asked whether he thought the vessel should have contacted the Coast Guard
sooner, Olson said investigators will determine that. "We always ask that
people call as soon as they can," he said. But it was severe winter squall
conditions that limited the Coast Guard's ability to assist the freighter,
he said.

Olson made a daylong round-trip journey from Anchorage to Unalaska Thursday
for a firsthand look. On his return, he dropped off in Kodiak the four-man
crew of the helicopter that crashed.

"They're doing well," Olson said. "Quite honestly, they're glad to be alive,
but they also are very upset that they were in an accident and six people
lost their lives."

It was still unclear what caused the helicopter to go down. It went into the
water near the freighter. The Coast Guard will investigate, but that could
be a lengthy process.

The Coast Guard and other responding agencies spent the day searching for
the freighter's six missing crew members and trying to assess the spill from
the air. They found no sign of the crew members, five Indians and one Filipino.

A mate on one of the tugboats during the rescue efforts Wednesday night
described brutal winter winds gusting up to 60 mph and seas as high as 30
feet. "We stood by the whole time," said Steve Devitt, who crewed on the tug
James Dunlap.

"We just got hammered out there."

A spokesman for the freighter's owner, IMC Transworld, said company agents
had contacted the families of the missing men.

"Of course they are very sad and want to know what is going on," said IMC
crew manager Loh C.W. Weng. "They are praying very hard that everyone is OK.
We are praying very hard for them."

No attempts were made Thursday to contain the widening oil slick, and state
environmental officials said they couldn't guess how much of the nearly
500,000 gallons of heavy bunker oil aboard had spilled. It is, however,
almost certainly the largest marine spill in Alaska since the 11
million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989.

The fuel, an unusually heavy substance called "bunker C," is a dense,
viscous oil used to power the ship. State environmental officials said it is
hard to contain and clean up once it hits the water. It sinks through the
water column and can coat the sea floor. In a smaller spill of the same fuel
off Unalaska several years ago, divers went down to scoop the mucky stuff
off the bottom.

"This is a very serious spill," Kurt Fredriksson, acting commissioner of the
Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, said at an afternoon press
conference. "It's going to be very difficult to deal with. It's difficult
oil ... and a sensitive shoreline."

Unalaska is in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

Fredriksson said that oil has coated some of the shoreline. No one has
gotten close enough to determine conclusively whether any wildlife has been
injured by the oil yet.

Fredriksson and Coast Guard officials said they haven't yet been able to
learn whether any oil is still safely contained in the ship or estimate how
much might have been lost.

Chief Petty Officer Roger Wetherell, a Coast Guard spokesman, said someone
would have to go onto the freighter to do that. "We need to determine
whether it's safe enough, and we haven't done that yet," he said.

Fredriksson said the good weather that visited the spill site Thursday is
not expected to last long. Winter in the Bering Sea is more likely to
resemble the blustery storm that tore the freighter apart Wednesday night.
Spill response agencies will have to consider the safety of workers trying
to react to a dangerous situation in a dangerous place on a daily basis, he
and Wetherell said.

"We will underline with a dark red pen human safety," Fredriksson said.

"There's no limitation on what we're going to put on this in terms of making
equipment and personnel available," he said.

But the spill is in a remote area accessible only by boat and helicopter. No
roads lead even close to the tall cliffs that look out on what's left of the
Selendang Ayu.

"This is a very difficult, Aleutian Islands environment," he said. "The
future does not look bright."

One person intimately familiar with the area is Greg Hawthorne, who operates
a summer fishing camp about 10 miles from where the Selendang Ayu came
aground between Spray Cape and Skan Bay.

In an interview Thursday, Hawthorne said the area is remote but spectacular,
populated by Steller sea lions, otters and seals. Anglers in the area go
after barn-door-sized halibut.

"This is one of those places you only hear about," Hawthorne said. "I get
seals coming up right on the beach because killer whales are 15 yards away,
chasing them."

Hawthorne said he has heard the western side of Skan Bay is coated with oil
and the spill is continuing to drift northwest with the current. That likely
would put it on his doorstep.

The 738-foot Selendang Ayu was loaded with soybeans and bound from Seattle
to China when it lost power in the Bering Sea. The vessel was following a
heavily trafficked shipping lane called the Great Circle Route, which
hundreds of ships follow each month on transits between the West Coast of
the United States and Asia. Part of the route cuts through the Aleutian
Islands; many ships slide through Unimak Pass.

The Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley, tugboats and a salvage vessel tried to
assist the freighter but failed. Over two days, the Selendang drifted more
than 50 miles southwest to Unalaska, snapping a tow line and an anchor chain
before its sole remaining anchor caught hold about 4,000 feet offshore.

Devitt, the James Dunlap mate, said he was listening to radio conversations
between the freighter and the cutter as the Selendang floundered. The
freighter's master thought he was close to getting its engines started after
two days of trying, maybe within an hour.

"Then he could have just driven away," Devitt said. "It sounded like they
were going to fix it."

But that last desperate effort also fell short.

An HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter airlifting some of the freighter's last crew
members crashed about 6:20 p.m. Wednesday, and the freighter split in half
about an hour later.

By Thursday afternoon, the broken ship's halves lay grounded several hundred
yards off the rocky beach and perhaps 50 yards apart. The bow portion faced
into the Bering Sea, looking as if it were anchored and waiting for its crew
to return. The stern of the ship sat lower in the water and listed slightly
to the port side.

Each half had been sheared off, exposing the ship's guts to the waves. Water
surged in and out, leaving the interior steel structure looking bright and
clean.

The Coast Guard doesn't know how much oil had leaked out of the ship, said
Lt. Cmdr. Chris Woodley, but it doesn't appear to have drifted out of Skan
Bay, he said.

Bunker oil had collected in thick mats close around the ship. Farther out in
the bay, it formed rainbow-hued sheens that had been stretched and
dissipated by high winds, leaving long brown streaks on the surface.

Closer to shore, oil had turned the clear blue Bering Sea into something
closer to chocolate milk. In places, the shoreline looked like a muddy
stream had emptied into it.

Oil coated the black-rock beaches in several areas of western Skan Bay, but
Woodley said nobody had been ashore yet to survey the damage or look for
injured or dead animals. Seabirds and bald eagles were seen in the area.

About a mile south of the ship, the remains of the Coast Guard helicopter
that crashed Wednesday had floated ashore. Resting on its belly, it was
missing its rotors and cabin and looked as if it had been burned, but the
white-and-orange aircraft was actually covered in oil.

Spill response officials hope to start deploying boom today, Woodley said.
The primary goal is to prevent oil from reaching four salmon streams in the
area.

They may also try to remove oil from the ship, but setting boom around the
vessel is not an option, he said. "The weather and sea conditions are way
too rough for that," he said. "We had 35-foot seas last night."

Officials will consider cleaning up some beaches, but not the most exposed,
Woodley said.

The spill has residents of Unalaska Island nervous, he said. More than 100
packed a meeting Thursday afternoon, asking questions about affected
resources and plans for cleaning up the mess.

"It was packed," Woodley said of the meeting. "It's a small town and they're
very concerned about this."

One who is particularly nervous is Hawthorne, the operator of the summer
fishing lodge, Volcano Bay Adventures.

He knows the area's currents and is sure that oil will soon hit his beach,
Hawthorne said. "It'll be a flipping mess," he said. "Regardless how good
they clean that up, there will still be oil and oil residue all over the place."

Commercial fishermen worried that the spill will affect the Bering Sea's
important fisheries.

The crab fishery around Skan Bay was closed for many years, but just opened
up again last year, said Emil Berikoff of the Unalaska Native Fishermen's
Association. The majority of the tanner crab taken from around Unalaska last
year, he said, came from around Skan Bay.

The tanner fishery is scheduled to open next month.

"It's one of the most productive fisheries grounds around the island," he
said. "So what effect that it's going to have, I just don't know."

Berikoff said currents in the bay move east. Very quickly the oil will be in
Makushin Bay. "And that's probably going to do a lot of damage to the
shellfish."

For Berikoff and other Unalaskans, the memory of the smaller Kuroshima spill
in 1997 is troubling. According to the DEC, the Kuroshima dumped about
36,000 gallons of fuel when that seafood freighter went aground on a part of
the island easily accessed by road.

"The Kuroshima was bad enough, but this is 10 times that," Berikoff said. He
said local fishermen are still feeling the effects of that spill with
diminished salmon stocks.

Matt Honan, who works in a building supply store, agreed.

"The concern being brought up is that the Kuroshima was (smaller), and look
at how that impacted us. This is huge."

Daily News reporter Joel Gay reported from Unalaska and reporters Don Hunter
and Megan Holland reported from Anchorage. Gay can be reached at
jgay@xxxxxxx, Hunter can be reached at dhunter@xxxxxxx, and Holland can be
reached at mrholland@xxxxxxxx Reporter Tataboline Brant and The Associated
Press contributed to this story.
--

Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
	--Bertholt Brecht.