HOME PAGE SUBSCRIPTIONS, Print Editions, Newsletter PRODUCTS READ THE PETROLEUM NEWS ARCHIVE! ADVERTISING INFORMATION EVENTS PETROLEUM NEWS BAKKEN MINING NEWS

Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
May 2010

Vol. 15, No. 19 Week of May 09, 2010

Alyeska wins over commercial fishermen

After threatening to strike, boats owners win higher pay and turn out strongly for spill response training in Prince William Sound

Wesley Loy

For Petroleum News

Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. believes it has calmed the recent rocky relations with commercial fishermen trained for oil spill response.

As evidence, Alyeska points to the many fishing boats taking part in a major training session from April 29 to May 3 at Cordova, the main commercial fishing port in Prince William Sound.

“We had an excellent turnout,” Alyeska spokeswoman Michelle Egan told Petroleum News on May 5. The training drew 98 vessels, she said, “more than we anticipated.”

Boat owners and crewmen seeking better pay and other benefits for participating in Alyeska’s spill response program had signaled they were prepared to boycott the training without significant compensation increases.

The fishermen said Alyeska for years failed to keep up with rising costs, and seemed to have shown the fleet too little respect.

State and federal authorities require Alyeska, which runs the oil tanker port at Valdez, to maintain a large fleet of fishing vessels to help clean up oil spills. Fishermen are trained on such tasks as deploying boom and skimming oil off the surface of the water, and they’re supposed to be ready to respond to spills within certain timeframes.

The boats come from Cordova plus the downstream ports of Valdez, Whittier, Seward, Homer and Kodiak.

Fishermen are pleased

One vessel owner who helped lead the rally for a raise said the new contracts from Alyeska have satisfied many fishermen.

Some boat owners doubled their pay, said the fisherman, who asked that his name not be printed because of a contract confidentially clause.

Fishermen were serious about their treat to strike, he said.

“We had the plan in our back pocket,” he said. “We would have gotten nowhere if we hadn’t organized.”

The Cordova training “went pretty well,” the fisherman said. “Guys were happy with the compensation package.”

But more work is needed, he said.

“There’s still some issues out there. A big one is insurance. No one really knows when it starts or how it works,” the fisherman said.

Questions exist over the reach of coverage Alyeska provides during training. For example, he said, does the insurance cover a crewman who goes to the store for groceries during training and suffers an injury?

Owners of boats obliged to respond quickest to oil spills are also interested in Alyeska insuring vessels not only during training but through the year, the fisherman said. The reason is because these boats must remain ready in the water and not in a storage yard as they otherwise might be when the fishing season is closed.

Vessel owners tentatively have a meeting planned for October with Alyeska representatives to talk about the insurance issue, the fisherman said.

Alyeska does homework

At one point, Alyeska admitted to regulators it was unable to assemble the required number of boats to respond to spills.

Fishermen said that was because many boat owners had lost enthusiasm for participating in the program.

After the fishermen brought forward their concerns, Alyeska set about verifying their costs, Egan said. Alyeska looked at inflation, fuel prices, trends on mooring fees at various ports, and the compensation fishermen receive in other spill response programs in Washington state and California.

“We kind of made our own market basket for the fishing fleet,” Egan said.

Alyeska found that, in fact, cost increases for the Alaska fishermen had exceeded the Consumer Price Index, she said.

So Alyeska rolled out a new contract.

Contracts are signed with individual boat owners, as there’s no collective bargaining with the fleet, Egan said.

Relations with the fleet now appear to be based on greater dialog and trust, she said.

“We feel good about the position we’re in,” Egan said. “We think the compensation changes made a big difference.”

Alyeska’s recent weekly calls to fishermen have tallied more than 350 boats available for spill response, compared to nearly a hundred fewer in January, she said.

“The numbers from recent calls are well beyond what is required,” Egan said.

Gulf crisis spotlights training

The recent Deepwater Horizon rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has highlighted the big role for fishermen in cleaning up a spill.

Some press reports have shown BP’s difficulty in trying to train fishermen rapidly amid a crisis.

An oil industry watchdog group in Cordova, the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, sounded an alarm months ago over the apparent erosion in the Alaska spill response fleet.

“It looks as if Alyeska has worked things out with the fishermen to keep things going for the next few months, mainly by giving some rate increases,” council spokesman Stan Jones said in an e-mail. “Longer-term, we are still planning to conduct a joint effort with Alyeska to analyze the problems, compensation rates, and come up with a scheme that will be stable for a while and not lead to the kind of friction we’ve seen this spring.

“For us, the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico has underscored the need to make sure the fishing vessel program here isn’t allowed to deteriorate!”






Petroleum News - Phone: 1-907 522-9469 - Fax: 1-907 522-9583
[email protected] --- http://www.petroleumnews.com ---
S U B S C R I B E

Copyright Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA)©2013 All rights reserved. The content of this article and web site may not be copied, replaced, distributed, published, displayed or transferred in any form or by any means except with the prior written permission of Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, LLC (Petroleum News)(PNA). Copyright infringement is a violation of federal law subject to criminal and civil penalties.