Tug grounding reinforces lessons of Exxon spill
By: STEVE LEWIS, board president of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, representative of the city of Seldovia.
The Coast Guard is still investigating the December 23 grounding of the Pathfinder ice scout tug in Prince William Sound, and few facts about the causes are known.
We have asked the Coast Guard to share its findings with us when its work is complete.
Some of the troubling questions we hope the Coast Guard will address in its investigation are already in evidence, and worthy of public consideration.
The first question is, how did the crew manage to hit Bligh Reef, the most famous navigational hazard in the Sound, 20 years after the Exxon Valdez did the same thing and spilled 11 million gallons of North Slope crude? What happened, or didn’t happen, aboard the Pathfinder to cause this accident?
And could the Coast Guard’s Vessel Traffic Center in Valdez, with its radar, its Automatic Identification System for ships, and its electronic charting, have spotted the danger and warned the tug’s crew? If that is not currently part of the traffic center’s mission, should the mission be expanded to help guard against such accidents in the future?
And what environmental harm will be caused by the diesel fuel that spilled into the water? While diesel is generally considered less harmful than crude oil, that doesn’t mean it’s harmless. This is the second diesel spill from the Pathfinder in the Sound in recent years, so it’s clear that this type of spill is a significant hazard. Diesel’s impacts on the marine ecosystem need to be understood so that effective countermeasures can be adopted.
Even as these questions are under study, they reinforce important lessons from the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989.
For one, constant vigilance is the price of safety. There is never a moment when we can assume the system in Prince William Sound is safe because there hasn’t been a catastrophe lately.
For another, backup systems are indispensable, and they need to be in place and operating. One of those, as mentioned above, is the Coast Guard traffic center. Another is the iceberg detection radar system that was installed several years ago on Reef Island after much expenditure and effort by our council, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., and the Coast Guard.
This system scans the tanker lanes for icebergs and transmits the information back to Valdez for use in sailing decisions for oil tankers—the same function performed by ice scouts like the Pathfinder. However, the Reef Island radar can detect icebergs in weather too dark or foggy for direct observation by vessel crews and thus can be a valuable adjunct to ice scout vessels.
Unfortunately, this system has been inoperative since late summer, after a Coast Guard upgrade to its own system on Reef Island took the iceberg detection radar system offline. The council believes it is of paramount importance to restore this system to service and has been working with Alyeska and the Coast Guard to that end.
Our council was set up to make sure the complacency that led to the Exxon Valdez disaster never returns. That is the main reason we are working so hard to preserve another crucial backup system in Prince William Sound: the system of double escort tugs for loaded oil tankers in the Sound. Our group is now lobbying Congress for federal legislation to preserve the double escorts so that, if another tanker should someday go astray and head for Bligh Reef, backup will be close at hand to prevent another catastrophe like the one in 1989.
Whatever the causes of the Pathfinder grounding are determined to have been, the incident should serve as a forceful reminder to the oil industry and its regulators that complacency never sleeps, so we humans can never let down our guard in Prince William Sound.