The Observer, January, 2009

Federal agency wants more scrutiny before allowing dispersant use in Sound, Inlet

The U.S. Department of the Interior has moved to require incident-specific consideration before chemical dispersants can be used on oil spills in large areas of Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet.

The policy shift, laid out in a Sept. 26 letter, withdraws Interior Department approval for what is called ‘preauthorized’ dispersant use in substantial parts of the two water bodies. Instead, the Interior Department said, spill managers will need to decide about dispersant use on a case-by-case basis.

“The use of dispersants in a particular incident may not adequately protect (Interior Department) resources,” wrote Pamela Bergmann, the department’s regional environmental officer in Alaska. “Therefore, preauthorization of dispersants without incident-specific information is no longer appropriate.”

Preauthorization means dispersants can be used by oil-spill response managers without consulting Interior or the other agencies with responsibilities in the affected area. The areas at issue are in what is called Zone 1 under dispersant use guidelines adopted in 1986 for Cook Inlet and in March 1989 for Prince William Sound (shortly before the Exxon Valdez spill).

“Information forming the basis of polices included in those guidelines is 20 or more years old,” Interior wrote, noting that environmental conditions change over time.

Interior also said that each incident is unique, and that consultations on dispersant use can be made quickly today, thanks to modern technology. Interior, the letter said, “has a track record of considering, both objectively and in a timely manner, requests for the use of dispersants.”

Dispersants in theory disperse spilled oil on the surface of the ocean into the water column. Thus, dispersant use is an environmental tradeoff. As the guidelines put it, “effects on water column organisms may be increased at one site so that effects can be decreased or eliminated at other sites.”

In Zone 1, the tradeoff analysis is presumed to have been made in advance and to have favored using dispersants so decisively that cleanup managers may do so without further analysis and without consulting affected agencies.

(In Zone 2, dispersants can be used only after incident-specific consideration. In Zone 3, areas close to sensitive shorelines, the chemicals are all but banned.)

Most of central Prince William Sound and Port Valdez were in Zone 1, the formerly preauthorized area, during the winter. In the summer, when more fish move through, parts of those areas switched to Zone 2. Zone 1 also took in waters off the Copper River Delta, off the Gulf of Alaska coast outside Prince William Sound, and along the southern Kenai Peninsula.

Zone 1 also included the central portion of northern Cook Inlet, as well as strips paralleling the east and west shores of the Inlet in the vicinity of Kamishak Bay and Kachemak Bay.

The Prince William Sound guidelines have not been revised since their adoption in 1989, despite the fact they were in effect at the time of the Exxon Valdez spill response, when dispersant use was attempted repeatedly and unsuccessfully.

The main dispersant stored in Alaska for use on Prince William Sound spills is Corexit 9527, the same product that failed during the Exxon Valdez response. The oil industry has stockpiled about 74,000 gallons of it in Anchorage and Valdez, plus about 1,000 gallons of a different dispersant.

A top federal official in the 1989 spill response estimated afterward that it would have taken 500,000 gallons of the chemical to treat the 11 million gallons of oil released by the Exxon Valdez.

The citizens’ council position on dispersants is that decades of research have not shown they will work in Prince William Sound conditions, nor established how harmful they are to the marine environment (they are, like crude oil, extremely toxic). Consequently, the council opposes dispersant use in the Sound until those questions are answered.

“We believe dispersants could well do more harm than good,” said John Devens, executive director of the council. “So we are glad to see an important agency like the Interior Department call for consultation before they are used anywhere in the Sound.”

Interior’s move has drawn objections from other agencies involved in the Alaska Regional Response Team, which is in charge of planning the response to crude oil spills in Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet.

Doug Helton and John Whitney, who represent the U.S. Department of Commerce on the response team, wrote on Oct. 3 that they were surprised and did not concur with the Interior Department’s action. They said the consultation process sought by Interior might be too time-consuming in the “often times chaotic and rapid pace of response decisionmaking.” Response managers, according to Whitney and Helton, “need to have greater latitude of authority regarding this time-critical response issue.”

Three other agencies that participate in the response team raised similar concerns in an Oct. 14 letter. They faulted Interior for not coordinating the move with the rest of the response team. And they said they were concerned that, without preauthorization, the oil industry might stop stockpiling dispersants in Alaska for quick response in the event of a spill. “An unintended consequence of this action could be a diminished dispersant capacity statewide and inability to protect and mitigate impacts to important resources.”

The letter was signed by Coast Guard Rear Admiral A.E. Brooks; Larry Hartig, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation; and Elin Miller, regional administrator for the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

In a Dec. 22 response, the Interior Department said it would stick with its decision. “Incident-specific consultation rather than preapproval is the best way for (the Interior Department) to meet its responsibilities,” wrote Willie R. Taylor, director of the agency’s Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance in Washington, D.C.

return to this edition