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Coast Guard study finds cargo ships pose biggest risk of oil spill Puget Sound and associated inland marine waters traversed by one or two oil tankers a day, but 30 or more freighters by The Associated Press
Cargo ships pose the biggest risk of oil spills Puget Sound and the associated inland marine waters, according to a new Coast Guard report.
The study also indicated the risk of a large oil spill will increase substantially with the anticipated growth in traffic through Seattle, Tacoma and other ports.
The surest but most expensive way to prevent oil spills is with mandatory tugboat escorts for all vessels as soon as they enter Washington state waters at Cape Flattery, the western end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the report said.
“If you want to be as safe as you can, and cost is no object, then you might want to escort everything,” said Capt. Scott Davis, chief of the Coast Guard’s local marine resources branch.
Freighter traffic expected to grow by 50 percent
As more oil tankers are built with double hulls to help prevent spills, the risk from those ships will drop, the Coast Guard report said. Meanwhile, freighter traffic will increase by 50 percent, from about 30 a day to about 46 a day.
The numbers favor a spill by one of them, rather than the one or two oil tankers that traverse the strait on an average day.
The Coast Guard report says that while an oil spill of more than 10,000 gallons can now be expected about once every five years, one will occur an average of once every 3.6 years by 2025.
Oil tankers “are not the major risk,” said Stan Norman, prevention section manager for the state Ecology Department. “My immediate reaction to the report is: We’re escorting the wrong vessels.”
Large cargo vessels can carry up to 2 million gallons of fuel oil, compared with about 10 million gallons of crude oil that was released by the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound 10 years ago, Norman said.
Tug escorts are required for tankers east of Port Angeles, and tankers are barred from Admiralty Inlet and Puget Sound as they make their way to and from refineries east of Anacortes and north of Bellingham.
No such requirements apply to cargo ships.
Environmentalists and the state have strongly supported stationing a rescue tug at Neah Bay at a cost of about $2.5 million a year in case any tankers or freighters become disabled or run aground. Shipping industry and Coast Guard Officials say they are satisfied with the industry’s “International Tug of Opportunity” system under which tugs would be withdrawn from normal operations to help any vessel in trouble.
This winter a tug is being stationed at Neah Bay as an experiment — and an added precaution in case navigation computers malfunction when 2000 arrives.
Spills in Puget Sound have been rare Without questioning the findings, Harry Hutchins, executive director of the Puget Sound Steamship Operators Association, said the study tends to overstate the danger because it is based on the nation’s overall experience with oil spills.
Spills in Puget Sound have been too rare for accurate danger predictions, he maintained.
Fred Felleman of Ocean Advocates praised the finding that freighters pose a major threat but said the report should have included oil spill cleanup costs in its cost-benefit analysis.
“They underestimate the risk of a spill and they don’t even evaluate the cost of spilling, so what good is this analysis?” Felleman said.
Similarly, Norman said the Coast Guard and the state agency have “a basic philosophical difference.”
“There were 10,000 safe tanker transits in Prince William Sound before the Exxon Valdez,” he said. “If you prevent just one (catastrophic spill), you’ve paid for any (protection measure) for a generation.”
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