Summer of The Spills

By Frank Trippett

With the Exxon Valdez disaster still grim and fresh in memory, any new spill would suffice to trigger a bad case of public jitters. As rotten luck would have it, last weekend brought three spills in a little more than twelve hours.

At 4:30 p.m. Friday, the Greek tanker World Prodigy struck a rock at Brenton Reef, just south of Newport, R.I., spewing about 600,000 gal. of fuel that immediately began drifting toward Newport Harbor. A few hours later, a tanker collided with an oil-filled barge near Houston, releasing 250,000 gal. of oil. Then, shortly before 5 a.m. Saturday, a tanker from Uruguay ran aground in the Delaware River just south of Claymont, Del., causing a discharge of up to 1.6 million gal. of industrial fuel.

The slick from a 200-ft. gash in the hull of the World Prodigy began washing up on the shore within hours. Even faster, the Bush Administration, which had been caught flat-footed by the Valdez's spill in Prince William Sound, sent in a team of high-level officials, including Environmental Protection Agency administrator William Reilly, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan and several White House advisers. While there was no chance the calamity would match the worst-in-history damage in Alaska, the Rhode Island spill could still wreak environmental havoc. The ship was loaded with a relatively light fuel that will break up much faster than the 11 million gal. of gooey crude that oozed out of the Exxon Valdez. However, the fuel is highly toxic and could pose a threat to the wildlife in Narragansett Bay.

As fumes from the spill wafted by the beach-front mansions in Newport, cleanup crews promptly deployed booms to contain as much of the spreading slick as possible. Robert L. Bendick, director of the state department of environmental management, reported that the disaster had attracted so many curiosity seekers that they were hampering cleanup efforts. The department ordered sightseers off the beaches until after the cleanup, and boaters were asked to stay at their docks.

Meanwhile in Texas, high winds and rough water complicated efforts to control the mile-long slick that resulted from a collision between the Panamanian-registered tanker Rachel B and a barge being towed by a tugboat in the Houston Ship Channel. Fortunately, the accident occurred in inland waters, where it is somewhat easier to clean up a spill than in the open sea.

The Uruguayan tanker Presidente Rivera, en route to Marcus Hook, Pa., was loaded with 28 million gal. of medium-heavy oil when it ran aground in the Delaware. While the spill was conspicuous, the Coast Guard's marine-safety office in Philadelphia moved quickly. Cleanup crews surrounded it with booms and began pumping the remaining oil in the ship's tanks into barges in order to limit the damage. The fast response was heartening. But the U.S. really needs a way of preventing more spills.

With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston