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State settles runaway oil tanker affair Tesoro, shipping firm to pay $429,870 to resolve claims from 2006 incident in which surging ice ripped vessel from Cook Inlet dock Wesley Loy For Petroleum News
Early on a frigid February morning in 2006, Alaskans awoke to startling media reports of a 600-foot oil tanker aground on a Cook Inlet beach near Nikiski.
Although no one was injured, the ship was saved and a major oil spill averted, the incident raised troubling questions about how a combination of tide and ice could somehow tear a tanker away from its moorings.
On July 1, state authorities announced an agreement with the ship’s operator and the refiner that chartered the tanker to settle an enforcement action brought against the companies in the wake of the grounding.
Under the settlement, Seabulk Tankers Inc. and Tesoro Alaska Co. agree to pay the state $429,870.
“In settling the matter, the companies do not admit to any violations,” a state press release said.
The settlement addresses state civil claims for the estimated five barrels of petroleum product that spilled when the tanker broke free from a dock and its cargo loading hoses, and for violations of Tesoro’s oil spill prevention and contingency plan.
“Protecting the environment and economy from the risk of spills is very important to the state,” said Larry Hartig, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation. “The spill prevention requirements in DEC-approved oil spill contingency plans are a key line of defense.”
Alaska Attorney General Dan Sullivan added: “The state takes these types of pollution prevention violations very seriously. This settlement demonstrates our resolve to recover substantial civil assessments when those requirements are not met.”
Dramatic breakaway The double-hulled tanker Seabulk Pride, with a carrying capacity of 342,000 barrels, was built in the late 1990s and has been a frequent visitor to ports in Alaska, Hawaii and the West Coast. It was under charter to Tesoro, which runs a refinery at Nikiski.
The vessel had arrived on Jan. 30, 2006, at Tesoro’s Kenai Pipe Line Co. dock to off-load crude oil and pick up a cargo of high sulfur fuel oil, heavy vacuum gas oil and regular unleaded gasoline, a U.S. Coast Guard investigative report said.
At 5 a.m. on Feb. 2, the ship had completed loading the fuel oil and was taking on heavy vacuum gas oil and gasoline through two hoses. It was cold, 6 degrees above.
The captain, Stewart Potter, had departed the bridge at 3 a.m. that morning, but a ship pilot, Jeffrey Pierce, was standing watch.
Pierce, a veteran pilot with substantial knowledge of “the danger of the ice and current present in Cook Inlet,” was watching for drifting ice and noticed it had diminished during the night with none around the vessel at 5 a.m., the Coast Guard report said.
But 15 minutes later, the pilot said ice began to flow again, quickly covering more than half the water’s surface, and the ice and current pushed against the ship in such a way as to strain its mooring lines.
When two mooring wires snapped, the order was given to shut down cargo loading.
“Mooring lines continued to part or spool off their winch reels over the next three minutes,” the Coast Guard report said.
Soon the Seabulk Pride would be adrift in the flood tide.
The pilot went to the captain’s stateroom and found Potter on the phone with the chief engineer. After confirming the captain was aware of the situation, Pierce returned to the bridge and saw the cargo hoses holding the ship to the pier also break, sending product onto the deck and into Cook Inlet.
The pilot ordered anchors dropped, but only the port anchor could be released “due to the starboard one being frozen in place by ice,” the Coast Guard report said.
The crew encountered more trouble when the ship’s engines failed to start after 12 attempts. It was later found that multiple lines were fouling the propeller, preventing the engines from starting.
At 5:36 a.m., the ship ran aground near the East Forelands, just over half a nautical mile north of the KPL dock.
Responders feared the ship might break apart on the beach, but with the help of rescue tugs the Seabulk Pride was refloated the next day with its cargo tanks intact.
Multiple failings cited The Coast Guard investigation found that the breakaway was caused by “a massive force directed on the bow of the ship pushing it parallel to the dock.”
This was unusual, investigators found, as the normal risk from ice and strong current at the KPL dock is for ice to wedge between the vessel and the shoreline, generating a force perpendicular to the dock rather than parallel.
“Given the magnitude of force placed on the vessel by the ice flow it is unlikely that any action the ship’s crew could have taken would have saved it from grounding once it had broken free of the dock,” the Coast Guard report said.
“The only sure course of action that would have prevented this casualty,” the report said, was for the tanker to depart the dock when the ice hit.
But the ship wasn’t ready and the crew struggled with the emergency, Coast Guard investigators found.
• No “seagoing watch” was manning the bridge, as required under the Coast Guard’s extreme ice guidelines in effect at the time.
• The engine room was not manned to keep the engines in immediate standby as required.
• The facility’s operations manual “called for mooring lines to be doubled or tripled in extreme ice conditions,” and lines with a higher breaking strength might have precluded the incident. “The mooring system was clearly inadequate for the conditions faced on the day of the incident. At least one line was observed to have been hand spliced.”
• Risk assessment was inadequate given the long cold spell around Cook Inlet. “There appeared to be a degree of complacency in regards to the risk ice presented. There was awareness of the risk of being wedged away from the dock by ice, but not being pushed parallel to the pier by it.”
• Strained mooring lines were slacked improperly, and crewmen had insufficient training for handling lines during heavy ice conditions. One able-bodied seaman with less than a month’s experience on the tanker was tending lines alone for a time and made matters worse by “releasing too much strain on the mooring lines.”
The Coast Guard said it would seek a two-month license suspension against the tanker captain for failure to ensure the moorings were strong enough to hold in all conditions.
Dock improvements made In signing the 11-page settlement agreement with Seabulk and Tesoro, state officials said they took into account improvements Tesoro made after the incident, including “significant upgrades” to the mooring line tension monitoring system at the KPL dock.
The Seabulk Pride crew lacked direct access to tension data, but tankers do now via laptops Tesoro is providing, the agreement says.
The state also noted Tesoro now stations a ship-assist tug at the dock during winter ice conditions.
The settlement agreement breaks down the $429,870 settlement amount as follows: $360,000 as a civil assessment for alleged violations of the spill contingency plan, $64,870 as reimbursement for the state’s response and investigative costs and $5,000 as an oil spill civil assessment.
The state will deposit $365,000 into the Oil and Hazardous Substance Release Prevention Mitigation Account.
In addition to the payments, Tesoro also is required to produce a $35,000 video to train tanker crews on Cook Inlet winter ice conditions.
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