Nor'Easter Spring/Summer 1996
Perspectives on Prologue On Friday, January 19, 1996, the worst oil spill in Rhode Island history occurred. It
was the second major oil spill in the state - the smallest in the nation - in seven years.
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Friday, January 19
Morning breaks with a cold, howling wind. By 9 a.m., gale warnings from New Jersey to Rhode Island are upgraded to storm warnings. It is not a day to be at sea in the Northeast.
By 2 p.m., a distress signal breaks out over marine radios. It is the tugboat Scandia, five miles offshore of Point Judith, R.I. In its tow is the 340-foot oil barge North Cape.....This is the tug Scandia.... We have a fire on board....This is a mayday! Scandia mayday! We are abandoning. We are abandoning off of Point Judith, off of Point Judith. Last communication!
By 3 p.m., the six-man crew is rescued from the stormy sea. But the burning tug, empty now and without power, and the unmanned oil barge - with 4 million gallons of No. 2 heating oil on board - begin their inevitable drift towards the R.I. shore.
The first thing I remember is Fred Pease, our research vessel captain, strolling into the office about 4 p.m. Friday, and saying, 'There isn't an oil spill yet - but there's going to be.' That was the first warning we had of the imminent spill.
We immediately set to work collecting environmental data that we had for the area, including information on winds and currents. When the tug and barge went aground about 7 p.m., the waves were large, with winds gusting up to 50 knots. When the spill began about 8:30 p.m., the wind had decreased dramatically, but the waves were nasty - 12 to 14 feet, with oil leaking out of the bottom of the barge.
At midnight, we sent our first predictions of the oil trajectory to the Coast Guard.-Malcolm Spaulding, URI ocean engineering professor
Saturday, January 20The day is sunny, but the beach wind this morning is cold, biting. We have come to see the spill. Like everyone else not authorized to be here, we must look over at Moonstone from Matunuck Beach. Just offshore, looking like you could wade out and touch it, is the tugboat Scandia. Close behind is the barge North Cape. I'm surprised how close they are - like some ancient shipwreck left there for children to play on.
-Carole Jaworski, R.I. Sea Grant communications director
I was warned about the oil spill Friday night and reported early Saturday to the beach. I worked the next seven days.
In reporting Saturday morning, I went to command central first. I had covered the World Prodigy and Shetlands oil spills and knew what I needed to find out. A pattern soon developed. Early in the morning, the response team would survey what was going on and then come back and have a press conference. This happened both morning and afternoon, with the crews working in between.
That first day it got quiet around midday and I went to see the spill itself. Horrendous as the night before had been, the day was calm, sunny, and beautiful. Because the wind was blowing offshore from the north, I couldn't smell oil.
Actually, it didn't look like a big deal. I went back to the paper and wrote about 20 column inches that we had lucked out and it wasn't so bad. But when I returned to the command center, the situation had changed. The tide had gone out and sucked a bunch of oil out with it. By afternoon, it was dramatically worse.
I found out later that the reason the oil was not so apparent was that it was mixed in the surf. That was a concept that didn't come out for days. It was the URI people, and Ken Hinga (oceanography assistant dean) in particular, demonstrating with an eggbeater, that changed the direction of our focus. URI had done the groundbreaking research on this oil at the Marine Ecosystem Research Laboratory.-Peter Lord, Providence Journal environmental reporter
The obvious thing on Saturday was that a lot of oil was leaking out. Unlike the World Prodigy oil spill - where in three days 99 percent of the oil was gone - in this case it was an open beach in bad weather. The oil got dissolved and suspended and mixed all the way to the bottom. The biggest effect, however, was due to weather. The water was cold - it would take three to 10 times longer to biologically degrade. There was much more opportunity for it to hang around and cause a lot more damage.
-Michael Pilson, URI oceanography professor
Sunday, January 21
On Sunday, we continued to predict the trajectory of the surface oil. More important, however, was where the subsurface oil would go. We used our models to estimate the path of this oil, specifically the volatile and toxic components, which are known to cause mortality. We gave this information to Jim Latimer, EPA research physical scientist, and Joe DeAlteris, URI fisheries professor, who subsequently went out on Sunday to sample.
-Malcolm Spaulding, URI ocean engineering professor
When I arrived on the scene with the university's research vessel, the odor of oil was strong. The wreck was one-quarter mile offshore and we got as close as 1 mile from the wreckage. The water's surface was covered with a brown, milky emulsion of water and oil. We did 15 sampling stations - from 1/2 mile to 2 miles off the beach. Results showed that oil was all the way down to the bottom in depths up to 15 meters. But the bottom fish community looked surprisingly well - not like the dead animals on the beach. We found no lobsters. Whether they were all on the beach dead, we can't tell. Every place we went, there was oil on the surface. One week later, when we sampled again, things had remarkably cleaned up. By then, there was no visible evidence of oil.
-Joseph DeAlteris, R.I. Sea Grant MAS coleader and URI fisheries professor
On Sunday morning, I went down to the beach on my own to see what happened. Obviously, this was not an ordinary winter storm because of the number of surf clams and lobsters up on the beach. After a storm, you sometimes see surf clams, but not lobsters in the numbers that I saw. This was both surprising and distressing. As I walked, I harked back to the World Prodigy spill. That didn't do a whole lot of damage. I thought this was the same kind of stuff. We got out of that one, and there seemed no reason we shouldn't get out of this. But why were the lobsters so affected? Obviously the oil is toxic and lobsters had been exposed to it. What surprised me was that there were so few cancer crabs on the beach. They live in much the same habitat as lobsters. They either weren't there, or they are less susceptible.
-Stan Cobb, URI biological sciences professor
The oil spill did not affect the beach's geology at all. There was some oil probably in the beach but there was enough accretion and erosion so that it would be removed. If you get right down to it, no oil hurts a beach geologically. Humans actually cause more damage to the natural profile of a beach, trying to get the oil out of there, than the oil does. If it was left up to a geologist, we would just say let it clean itself. But of course, it is the biology that is of paramount importance in a spill.
-Jon Boothroyd, URI geology professor
Lingering Impressions
My impression of the command center was that people were haggard: they wore themselves out. It was energizing to have a crisis; people found it exciting. DEM and others would tell war stories. When you drove down that road in Galilee and saw all those TV trucks and mobile units, you knew something important was going on. I could be up for 12 hours and it wasn't until I went back to the office, and it was quiet, that I felt tired. I know some who worked on the World Prodigy and it was a fascinating time of their lives.
My lasting impression - and it's more apparent now - is this attitude that we can fix anything. Contrast this to England, where they don't even try to clean up. Here, the attitude remains that we have to do something. It's an American attitude that we can do anything. We spent a lot of money picking up not very much oil. We found out after the World Prodigy that we dump more in chronic spills than we do in a major spill.
The spill attracted a pool of people - from volunteers who wanted to jump in and fix things, to people seeking business opportunities, to scientists doing research - it drew all kinds of people who, for a while, all mixed together.
During this spill, the news was flying. Now, it's all gone and it's hard to capture interest. A happening like this, like an oil spill, gets people interested in the environment again. A lot of teachers made use of the oil spill: It started a lot of conversations that might not have happened.-Peter Lord, Providence Journal environmental reporter
Because of its nature, I knew this oil would kill things, but it wouldn't last. Whatever oil that remained in the water would be biodegraded by bacteria: They eat it. Once they start to eat it, half would be gone in a week. Once bacteria begin to eat it, it would be further diluted. In a very small number of weeks, there would be none detectable in the water column. This is true in the ocean ponds as well. There might be some residual amount in the sediments, but we anticipate that to be small. By summer, it will be very difficult to find any of that oil except in very localized places. The basis for our information comes from direct experiments at URI's Marine Ecosystem Research Laboratories in the 1970s that showed how fast this oil degraded in the water column and the sediments.
-Michael Pilson, URI oceanography professor
The initial focus of spill response is to go after the source and control it. That job got done. It might have taken a while, but after some 800,000 gallons were spilled, they were able to take off the rest and move the barge.
But in terms of cleanup, one really has to question the use of resources. It appears to me that the offshore skimming operation was a waste of time and resources. Only four bags, containing some 25,000 gallons of oil and water mixture each, were collected - and less than 5 percent of that was oil. Why spend the time and money to collect this small amount of oil when it dissipates naturally?
Also, if we thought through the response process more carefully, we could better use limited resources. For instance, is there a better way to use volunteers and the science community? We need a preplanned strategy with a list of things people can do.-Malcolm Spaulding, URI ocean engineering professor
Our role is to investigate the loss to the lobster population. We will do diving surveys, the goal of which is to assess the extent of the loss to the lobster population and try to estimate the number of lobsters still there. This will be compared to data from earlier years on population size in nearby areas.
What really struck me was the lack of coordination and difficulty in getting an overview and coordinated response to assessing the damage. Because of the way the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 is written, the responsible party must pay for damage assessment. But that puts university researchers in a dilemma: They are state employees, but they are the knowledgeable researchers who must be hired by the responsible party. In the adversarial legal context, sides were chosen very quickly. At one point, it looked like the state and I (a state employee) were on opposite sides. It was a very uncomfortable situation.-Stan Cobb, URI biological sciences professor
Where I tried to have an impact is this: After the last oil spill, Malcolm Spaulding and I talked about when booms would work and when not. There are certain current speeds where they won't work. What I believe should be done is to stockpile sand so that breachways to ponds can be closed off. But you have to have stockpiles ahead of time. If stockpiled, you could plant dune grass on it - call it a dune-in-waiting. You can use sand or gravel, it doesn't matter.
As for my lasting impression: It will probably happen again and we ought to be more ready.-Jon Boothroyd, URI geology professor
Epilogue:
Moonstone Beach, April 1996The beach is deserted now. Not even the piping plovers - the endangered species to whom the beach was given over a few years back - are in sight, though the sand is roped off to separate them from us. Two jet trails linger in the sky, as if to remind us that humans leave their mark everywhere, even on a deserted beach.
The surf is gentle now - a tame, hushed, muted version of that stormy day in January when fire, peril, and rescue broke out off these shores. There are no signs of life on the beach - but no signs of death, either. It is winter, though the calendar says April.
The sand looks pristine, as though all that happened here in January is a distant dream. There are hundreds of shiny agates, glistening beneath the sun, and tiny pieces of quahog shells, broken and miniaturized long ago. But mostly it is sand - sandbox-looking sand to please even the most fastidious parent.
A few more human stragglers show up - two mothers with a gaggle of children out for discovery; a man alone, come to look; two men, taking pictures; an older couple from Connecticut, come to see what an oil spill site looks like. Back from the beach, a marsh bird sings its song, encouraging spring.
Nature at work, restoring balance.
Carole Jaworski is Communications Director for Rhode Island Sea Grant.