Relief over 'less severe' fuel spill

US Coastguard chiefs say an oil and fuel spill from a freighter that broke in two when it ran aground off Alaska is probably thousands of gallons less than they feared.

Incident commander Captain Ron Morris said just 41,138 gallons of bunker fuel were inside the tank that was directly breached when the Malaysian soya bean freighter Selendang Ayu split in two last Wednesday.

Coastguard officials said last week they thought the 140,000-gallon tank had been full.

Determining which tanks remain intact is a key part of developing a plan to offload remaining oil, and eventually remove the freighter’s bow and stern sections.

The ship was carrying 483,000 gallons of heavy bunker oil and about 21,000 gallons of diesel fuel when it ran aground.

Officials said a tank with 104,448 gallons of bunker oil had apparently also been breached, but that no large-scale leak was believed to be happening there.

Virtually no oil has been recovered.

The vessel Redeemer attempted skimming operations with equipment geared towards heavy oil, said Gary Folley, the state’s on-scene co-ordinator. “They have been encountering heavy sheen and tar balls (heavy oil globs mixed with rock, dirt or sediment) but no recoverable oil,” he said.

“It’s not easy to recover with a traditional skimmer.”

Recovery officials have detected few animals affected by the spill. Two dead cormorants were spotted last week. Five dead waterfowl, three more cormorants and two other seabirds were spotted on Sunday, Morris said.

A break in the weather on Sunday allowed a Coastguard helicopter to place a three-man assessment crew on the stern, but the helicopter did not have the same luck yesterday, Morris said.

“The forward section is awash,” he said. “The waves are coming over the deck.”

Howard Hile of Gallagher Marine Services, who is heading the recovery for the ship’s owners, said a salvage plan was between two days and a week away. He said the preferred option would be to remove oil before either part of the ship was moved.

Leslie Pearson, prevention and emergency response programme manager for Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation, said it was unlikely a vessel carrying a pump would be able to lift oil from the damaged freighter sections. “It’s just too dangerous,” she said.

A more likely scenario is an airlifted pump – brought in by heavy-lift helicopter – placed on the freighter itself that could pump oil off into other tanks.

The freighter lost power in its main engine last Tuesday, and tugs and coastguard cutters were unable to halt its drift to Unalaska Island.

Six crew members from the ship were lost when a coastguard helicopter crashed after lifting them off the vessel last Wednesday. Four other people were rescued, including the three helicopter crew members.