This month, three small oil spills in Puget Sound and two close calls with cargo ships served as grim reminders that there are catastrophic accidents out there, just waiting to happen.
Now is the time to redouble our efforts to prevent oil spills from happening and improve response capabilities when they do occur.
Government agencies, shippers, the U.S. Coast Guard and other partners in maritime safety must do everything within their power to upgrade and update oil spill prevention and response programs.
Many of the spill prevention and response programs in place are decades old and fail to use technological advances that could reduce the damage from an oil spill.
So much is at stake: State Department of Ecology officials have estimated that an oil spill in Puget Sound similar to the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska could cost the state’s economy nearly $11 billion and affect 165,000 jobs.
The damage to a Puget Sound marine ecosystem already showing signs of unraveling from years of pollution and habitat loss would be unfathomable.
Consider this: more than 2,400 commercial ships, oil tankers and fuel barges carrying some 22 billion gallons of oil as cargo or fuel plied the waters of Puget Sound last year during 10,000 individual voyages. Some would say it is a stroke of luck, given the geographic complexity of Puget Sound with all its narrow inlets and waterways, that we have yet to experience a catastrophic spill.
It would be easy in these difficult economic times to cut back on prevention and oil spill response programs under the guise of saving money. But it would be foolish.
The Puget Sound Partnership, the state agency charged with overseeing Puget Sound cleanup and protection, did the right thing in the wake of the October spills and near-misses to reconvene the state’s Oil Spill Work Group.
The work group consists of representatives from the private sector, environmental and government agencies and tribes charged with making recommendations to the Legislature on how to prevent and aggressively manage oil spills in Puget Sound, the Columbia River and the outer coast.
This year, the group advanced legislation – House Bill 1186 – passed by the Legislature to improve all spill response.
The bill:
• Stiffens penalties for owners or operators of vessels involved in a spill or found to not have updated oil spill contingency plan filed with the state Department of Ecology.
• Calls on vessel owners or operators to use best achievable technology that allows for a continuous response to a worst-case oil spill.
• Better incorporate volunteers and private fishing boats into oil spill response plans.
Granted, these measures, coupled with those already in place, won’t guarantee that catastrophic oil spills won’t occur in state waters. There’s just too much vessel traffic and cargo volume to eliminate the risk.
But it’s reasonable to expect shippers and regulators to be constantly updating and upgrading their prevention and spill-response programs, taking advantage of lessons learned every time an oil spill disaster strikes in other marine waters around the globe.
On Oct. 11, a grain ship carrying 100,000 gallons of fuel lost propulsion in high winds and heavy seas about nine miles west of the mouth of the Columbia River. Fortunately, the crew was able to successfully drop anchor and repair the vessel, rather than being blown ashore.
How many close calls will occur before the perfect storm of events leads to a major oil spill in state waters? Nobody knows.
But the risk is real and constant and so must be the vigilance and expertise that goes into oil spill prevention and response programs.
