The Observer, May, 2009

Scott is OSPRC’s resident expert on towing boom

Twenty years ago this spring, Gordon Scott was driving his fishing boat through heavy oil from the Exxon Valdez spill when he noticed the odd behavior of the oil-coated waves.

They weren’t very tall for the 70 mph wind that was blowing, and they “just slumped over,” Scott remembers, rather than exhibiting the classic curl and break of ocean waves. He got out his video camera and started taping.

Then, day became night.

“One of the waves slapped the bow, Scott says. “The spray came right over the top and suddenly my windows just went black.”

And that was during the first day that Scott and his boat—the Early Times—worked on the spill. In all, he spent 186 days in the spring, summer, and fall of 1989 on the Exxon cleanup.

One of his most vivid memories is of grappling with one of the main problems in the cleanup: not enough equipment to skim up and store the oil that Scott and other fishermen collected in the boom they towed behind their boats.

Each boom—typically 700 feet long—was towed by two fishing boats working in partnership. The result was a U-shaped configuration that corralled and contained the oil as the captains drove their boats through it.

He recalls the time his booming team captured 40,000 gallons of oil, then couldn’t get rid of it. “We collected the oil in 12 hours,” Scott says. “But there were no skimmers to take it off, so we towed it around for four days. We were inventing it all as we went along.”

Given his work on the spill and all it taught him about capturing and towing oil, it’s not surprising he joined the council’s Oil Spill Prevention and Response Committee—usually known as OSPRC—in 1992. He applied his expertise to, among other things, the oil industry’s first manual for towing boom in Prince William Sound.
The manual said boom could be towed at 2 knots, which Scott knew was four times the real half-knot top speed. It took years, he says, but the manual was finally revised to reflect reality.

That reality is also reflected in the title he plans to give his oil-spill book, if he ever writes it: “Life At Half A Knot.”

Scott came to Alaska in 1974 to look for work on construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline. Now, 35 years later, he’s still here, living in Girdwood with his wife, Elly, and three sons aged 14-18.

He makes his living fishing in Prince William Sound, and by working on the ski patrol at Alyeska. Among other things, he’s the lead gunner for the 105mm Howitzer artillery piece used to bring down avalanches at the resort under controlled conditions, rather than when skiers are on the slopes.

These days, he long-lines for halibut and cod in the Sound. Before the spill, he also fished for spot shrimp, but that fishery never reopened after 1989. Now, however, he says there may be hope. The state board of fisheries adopted a commercial management plan for the species in March of this year, though it’s still uncertain if or when that will mean an opening. “Maybe next year, maybe never,” Scott says with a shrug.

Scott plans to stay on OSPRC, in hopes his expertise will help in dealing with the unthinkable if it happens again.

Oil-spill response capability has improved since 1989. For example, Alyeska Pipeline now uses the Current Buster booming system, which can be towed at about 4 knots, or 4.5 mph. That’s around eight times as fast as the boom Scott used after the Exxon spill.

“A lot of progress has been made,” he acknowledges. “But you can’t get rid of the fact that oil on water is not a good thing, especially when wind makes response ineffective.”

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