Oil Is Pouring on Troubled Waters

In the storm-tossed waters off Massachusetts last week, 7.6 million gal. of oil slid slowly seaward. In the Delaware River, southwest of Philadelphia, 134,000 more gal. of deadly goo spread toward rich tidal marshes. In Los Angeles, the wreck of a blast-shattered tanker still lay smoldering at its berth. Suddenly, on East Coast and West, the U.S. was undergoing an ordeal by oil.

The disasters began more than two weeks ago, when the Liberian-flag tanker Argo Merchant, well off course, ran hard aground on the Nantucket shoals, a well-charted section of the sea just southeast of Nantucket Island. After a week's battering by wind and waves, the 640-ft. ship began breaking up, spilling its entire cargo into the frigid Atlantic. Immediately endangered were not only the sandy strands of Nantucket and Cape Cod but also the rich fishing grounds of Georges Bank. Shortly after the Argo Merchant grounding, another Liberian ship, the Sansinena, exploded in Los Angeles harbor with a blast that rattled windows for miles and killed at least five people (four crewmen are still missing).

Heavy Traffic. Last week two more accidents occurred. Another Liberian tanker, the Daphne, ran aground off Puerto Rico and still another, the Olympic Games, grounded and suffered a hull puncture during a docking maneuver at Marcus Hook, Pa. Moving downstream in a slick 32 miles long, its cargo seeped into marshes, coating wintering waterfowl with a sticky layer of oil that matted their feathers and robbed them of their insulating properties. Tens of thousands of birds were endangered.

Because the catastrophes were clustered so closely, their drama was heightened. But they may be only a sample of things to come. The transportation of oil by sea has increased enormously in the years since World War II, and oil tankers, once a little-noticed breed of ship, now constitute more than half of the world's merchant-ship tonnage. In U.S. ports, tanker traffic has increased proportionately as the nation has turned heavily to imports to meet its growing thirst for fuel. In 1966 the U.S. imported 940 million bbl. of oil and petroleum products. Now nearly three times as much is arriving in U.S. ports--about 300 million gal. a day.

Oil pollution can only increase. Of the estimated 5 million tons of oil dumped into the oceans annually, tankers--partly by deliberately flushing cargo tanks before reloading--account for nearly one-third. This figure is sure to rise.

In 1950 a tanker of 28,000 tons was considered so impressive that Britain's Princess Margaret formally launched it. By 1960, tankers of more than 100,000 tons were becoming commonplace. Now the supertankers make the 18,743-ton Argo Merchant seem like a skiff by comparison. Over 30% of the world's tanker fleet consists of ships with capacities of over 200,000 tons. Japan's Globtik Tokyo (length: 1,243 ft.; draft: 91 ft. 11 in.) can carry a whopping 476,292 tons. The hazards such ships pose are correspondingly enormous.

Fortunately, major accidents involving tankers have been infrequent, but those that do occur are spectacular. The Liberian ship Torrey Canyon spilled over 30 million gal. of oil when it went aground off England's Cornwall coast in 1967. The Metula dumped about 16 million gal. of Persian Gulf crude when it grounded in 1974 in the Strait of Magellan, polluting an area where Charles Darwin had gone ashore more than a century earlier to study animals and plants. The Jacob Maersk lost or burned some 26 million gal. when it exploded off Portugal in 1975.

The effects of such spills remain to be fully determined. Little long-term damage seems to have resulted from the Torrey Canyon disaster; indeed, the most serious effects on marine organisms have been blamed not on the oil but on the detergents used to disperse it. Spills closer to shore can have much more dramatic effects. Large numbers of fish, shellfish, crustaceans and marine worms were killed almost immediately when a barge capsized and spilled over 200,000 gal. of oil into Buzzards Bay, off Falmouth, Mass., in 1969. Eighteen months later, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported that the oil was still spreading along the bottom at 40-ft. depths, covering more than 5,000 acres offshore and polluting 500 acres of tidal rivers and marshes.

Ecological Hazard. No scientists are willing to forecast the effects of the oil now spreading seaward from the Argo Merchant. Most believe that if the globs of oil, called oilbergs because most of their mass is below the surface, continue to move east, the damage will be held to a minimum. But shifting winds could still bring the oil ashore, fouling beaches and causing massive ecological damage. The spill has already driven hundreds of sea birds ashore, bedraggled and helpless. The oil could also threaten humpback whales, which migrate through the affected area, and imperil the already endangered gray seals that winter off Nantucket. But of greatest concern is the threat to the Massachusetts fishing industry, which employs some 30,000 men and has been slowly coming back after a long period of economic depression. "We fear damage will be long-lasting and pervasive," said Governor Michael Dukakis in a letter requesting federal aid for his state's fishermen. The fishermen's reaction was even stronger: a class-action suit for $60 million in damages has been filed against the Argo Merchant's owners on behalf of twelve groups of fishermen.

Cleaning up oil spills is still very much a developing science. Such devices as booms to contain spilled oil and vacuum cleaners that suck it off the surface may work fairly well in the quiet waters of harbors or slow-flowing rivers. But the open ocean poses all but insuperable problems. Coast Guardsmen lost $200,000 worth of equipment when stormy seas forced them to abandon attempts to take off the Argo Merchant's cargo. The pounding waves rendered booms useless and stymied the Coast Guard's attempts to set the oil on fire.

Efforts to prevent spills seem to be equally ineffective. The U.S. is doing a decent job of regulating American flagships, mandating such things as crew qualifications and training, navigational and safety equipment. But it has done little to regulate foreign ships, many of which are registered in Liberia and Panama to avoid U.S. or European taxes, wage scales and expensive--hence profit-cutting--regulations on crews and equipment. Liberia, which has no natural harbor, has the world's largest tanker tonnage--with some of its ships American-owned. Such ships and their crews frequently fail to meet adequate safety standards. The Argo Merchant, for example, was involved in 18 "incidents"--including two previous groundings--before the Nantucket disaster. Her captain since June, Georgios Papadopoulos, 43, admitted at a hearing last week that his ship carried no LORAN (long-range navigation) equipment. His gyrocompass, he said, was not being used just prior to the accident because it was six degrees off, and the helmsman was steering by magnetic compass. He himself had not had an accurate fix on his position for more than 15 hours. Even if he had known his position, he might still have been in trouble. The water current charts he was using were November's, not December's, an important difference.

Environmentalists have used the accidents to call again for action to control the risks posed by oil carriers, and they are urging the U.S. to adopt stricter tanker regulations. Some charge that the Coast Guard has ample authority under the Ports and Waterways Safety Act of 1972 to upgrade the standards of foreign ships entering U.S. waters, and accuse the service of moving too slowly to use this power. "The Coast Guard has been almost negligent," claims Jeffrey Knight, legislative director for Friends of the Earth. "It has been since 1972, and that's a long time to twiddle your thumbs." Environmental Protection administrator Russell Train is more charitable. Says he: "I think the Coast Guard is essentially conservative."

Rear Admiral William Benkert, chief of the Coast Guard's Office of Merchant Vessel Safety, indignantly denies the environmentalists' charges. "We haven't been sitting on our dead ass," he protests. But someone is. The U.S. has yet to ratify the liability convention adopted by the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization in 1969. Congress has yet to see the Administration's bill carrying out IMCO'S 1973 convention on ocean pollution. Nor was the U.S. successful in pushing for the adoption of rules requiring newly constructed tankers to have double bottoms. Such a construction feature is now mandatory on all craft carrying chemicals and liquified, flammable gas, and, according to a federal law enforcement officer, would have prevented the oil spill in the Delaware grounding. "It is," said Train, "damned hard to move anything in these international forums."

For spills inside the U.S. or within twelve miles of its shores, the federal Water Pollution Control Act now imposes strict liability on any ship that dumps oil; it requires offenders to pay for cleaning up the mess. The captain of Olympic Games was arrested last week and held on $50,000 bail under provisions of this law. "For the first time," said U.S. Attorney David W. Marston, "we are providing with this legal action a real incentive for captains, pilots and owners to meet a higher safety standard when they use U.S. waters."

Somber Thought. Some officials argue that stricter controls will discourage shipowners from sending their fleets to U.S. ports, with the result that the country will be unable to get the oil it needs. But others disagree. Over a period of years, the U.S. has adopted international conventions governing safety at sea and now requires all ships calling at U.S. ports to pick up passengers to meet the same strict standards. At first many shipowners objected. But those eager for a share of a lucrative market quickly complied. Oil shippers would almost surely do the same.

Futurists add one final somber thought: The world's oil will eventually run out and be replaced by something else. The seas--and their resources--are irreplaceable.

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