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Polar Tankers fined $2.5 million Spill was unreported; attempt made to cover up incident draws fine, probation; company dismisses individuals responsible Wesley Loy Anchorage Daily News
A ConocoPhillips tanker company has agreed to pay a fine and other penalties totaling $2.5 million for spilling oily sludge into the ocean after leaving Valdez with a load of Alaska oil, then falsifying records to cover it up.
Polar Tankers Inc. pleaded guilty Oct. 23 in Anchorage to a criminal pollution violation, and U.S. District Judge Russel Holland placed Polar on probation for three years.
Company officials dismissed the captain and chief engineer of the tanker Polar Discovery, federal prosecutors said.
The government requested, and the judge approved, a $250,000 reward for a crewman who tipped U.S. Coast Guard officials in Valdez about a spill on the ship’s deck.
The crewman, James Legg of Olympia, Wash., later provided video of the ship’s crew trying to clean oil that ran off the deck and down the side of the tanker.
“The spill itself would not have been criminal,” Karen Loeffler, an assistant U.S. attorney, said Oct. 23. “Accidents do happen on vessels.” The problem was that the captain and chief engineer tried to hide the spill by not properly documenting it in the ship’s logbooks, she said.
The captain and chief engineer were not named in court papers available Oct. 23, and Loeffler would not say whether they or other Polar employees or former employees face prosecution.
A 35-page plea agreement says prosecutors won’t seek criminal prosecution against the companies for alleged violations aboard two other tankers, the Polar Alaska and the Polar Endeavour.
Phony drill logged ConocoPhillips is Alaska’s top crude oil producer.
The company hauls its oil to West Coast and Hawaiian refineries aboard five double-hulled tankers, all of them built and put into service since 2001.
The plea agreement and other court papers say the 895-foot Polar Discovery filled up with North Slope oil at Valdez in January 2004 and headed south through the North Pacific Ocean.
At sea, the engineering crew transferred oily sludge from engine room tanks through piping to a holding tank on deck.
Because of an open valve, however, sludge spilled onto the deck and some ran through scuppers — decktop openings that allow rain and seawater to drain overboard. The amount spilled was unclear Oct. 23.
The ship’s crew, primarily the chief engineer, didn’t record the oil transfer and spill as required, a charging document says.
And the captain, in an effort “to hide the fact that he and his crew discharged this oily sludge directly into the ocean,” falsified the bridge logbook.
“Rather than recording that the vessel slowed down and turned away from the wind so that the ship’s crew could clean oil from the side of the ship, the captain instead recorded that the ship had performed a man overboard drill,” the charging document says.
The cleaning was “a highly dangerous maneuver” that would have raised the suspicion of company officials monitoring the ship’s voyage by satellite, prosecutors said.
ConocoPhillips cooperative The specific charge to which Polar pleaded guilty was “failure to maintain an oil record book.”
The judge ordered Polar Tankers to pay a $500,000 criminal fine and to pay $2 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit organization established by Congress. The money will go toward environmental and other projects to protect coastal waters near Valdez and in Prince William Sound.
Prosecutors said ConocoPhillips was cooperative, fired employees found to be at fault, and tightened company policies and procedures.
The $2.5 million in penalties doesn’t come close to a record for a maritime pollution case, prosecutor Loeffler said. For example, in the so-called Boyang case concluded in 2002, four shipping companies agreed to pay a total of $5 million in fines on charges of dumping waste oil at sea.
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