The Observer, July 2006

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From the Executive Director: Shippers won’t commit to protecting escort system

By JOHN DEVENS
Executive Director

For over a year now, our council has been working to get the oil industry and its regulators to promise not to change the Prince William Sound tanker escort system without a definitive scientific study showing that safety would not suffer.

Much to our frustration, we haven’t made much progress. We’ve heard verbal pledges to avoid changes that could increase the danger of another disaster like the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but, so far, nobody is willing to put it in writing.

At present, each loaded oil tanker leaving Prince William Sound is required by state and federal regulators to be accompanied by two powerful escort tugs. The future of this practice is in question because the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990 imposes the double-escort requirement only on single-hull tankers. The Valdez fleet is transitioning to double-hull tankers, as also required by the Oil Pollution Act, but the Act says nothing about escort requirements for double-hull tankers.

The council position is that the escort requirement is fine as it is and that no reduction should be allowed unless a special type of study called a risk assessment shows that danger would not increase.

At our board meeting in Seward last fall, we invited the tanker companies, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and the U.S. Coast Guard to give us their views on the matter.

The discussion was long and wide-ranging – the transcript runs to 42 pages – but the shippers and regulators seemed to agree with us. That was put most clearly by Tom Colby, an employee of Alaska Tanker Company who spoke on behalf of the Response Planning Group, which includes all the companies that ship oil through the Sound. Said Colby:

One thing that was agreed upon amongst the shippers was that we were not interested in going down a road that would increase risk at all.

Maybe so, but getting these companies to make that official has proved to be impossible. Soon after the Seward meeting, we invited them and their regulators to sign a Memorandum of Understanding incorporating the positions we thought they had endorsed.

They refused to do so.

Then we sent them a letter summarizing what we regarded as the key points of the Seward discussion, along with a transcript of that discussion.

The Response Planning Group’s answer alleged unspecified “inaccuracies” and “errors” in our letter, then went on to lay out the position of the oil shippers on the escort system. They did say they wanted a risk assessment before any changes are made, and, generally speaking, we agree with the standards they proposed for conducting any such study.

Much to our dismay, however, the tanker companies did not pledge to avoid changes that would increase the danger of another giant oil spill.

Consequently, we don’t believe Alaskans can be confident that the oil industry and its regulators can be trusted to preserve and protect the world-class safety system put in place in Prince William Sound after 1989.
Accordingly, we will maintain extra vigilance over the coming year to guard against any effort to weaken it.

• John Devens is executive director of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council.