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Error puts two tankers in Valdez Narrows
The Associated Press
A procedural error moved two tankers loaded with crude oil from the North Slope into a navigational bottleneck known as the Valdez Narrows, violating federal regulations that say only one ship at a time should sail through the waterway.
A U.S. Coast Guard commander said the ships, one trailing the other, never came dangerously close to one another.
The primary purpose of the regulations is to make the Narrows essentially a one-way street — with no chance of an empty, inbound tanker crowding or running head-on into a loaded tanker heading out of Valdez.
But the regulation also bars two tankers traveling in the same direction from entering the Narrows together, Gardiner said.
The Narrows is a particularly dangerous place for mariners, as maneuvering room is tight and the tankers need lots of water to turn or to stop in case of an emergency. At its most narrow point, the waterway is less than a mile wide.
The miscue on July 10, raises a red flag with a Valdez-based oil industry watchdog organization, which worries about how tanker traffic is managed in Prince William Sound.
“The fact that the system slipped up is what makes us nervous,” said Stan Jones, spokesman for the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council. The council was formed by congressional mandate after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Second clearance was in error According to the Coast Guard the tanker SeaRiver Baytown — which carries oil for Exxon Mobil — received permission from the Coast Guard’s Vessel Traffic Center in Valdez to depart from the dock.
A second ship, the Polar Adventure owned by Conoco Phillips, received the same permission 25 minutes later.
The two ships, each escorted by powerful tugboats, sailed west through the Port of Valdez toward the Narrows, a rock-studded four-mile channel leading to Prince William Sound.
Each ship required a second clearance from the Coast Guard to enter the Narrows. The regulations specify that only one large ship is allowed to travel through the channel at a time.
The Coast Guard gave the first ship, the Baytown, permission to go through. A watch supervisor in the Vessel Traffic Center focused his radar on commercial fishing vessels to see that they cleared out of the tanker’s path.
Subsequently, the supervisor realized he’d made a mistake by giving the trailing tanker, the Polar Adventure, permission to enter the Narrows before the Baytown had exited.
As it turned out, both ships sailed on through the Narrows without incident, never coming closer to one another than about two miles, said Cmdr. Michael Gardiner, who heads the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Office in Valdez. Tankers have seen trouble in the Narrows before. In July 2001, escort tugs had to haul an oil tanker to a stop to avert a possible collision with a salmon seiner that was in the way.
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