Prince William Soundly Soiled in Oil Again
by C. L. Cook
Reports began filtering out Christmas Day of a tug boat run aground on Bligh reef, the same one that famously tore the guts out of the Exxon Valdez twenty years ago.
As with the Valdez, oil spewed from the crippled ship, fouling again the once pristine fishing grounds. The Coast Guard has yet to confirm how much of the tugboat, Pathfinder's diesel has spilled into the sound, but they confirm the tug has a capacity of 127 thousand litres.
Australia's ABC News reported, flyovers had confirmed oil in the water, spanning a distance of approximately five kilometers and thirty meters wide, but that news is now 24 hours old.
The tug was apparently patrolling the shipping lanes for floating ice when it struck Bligh. On March 24, 1989, the Valdez spilled more than eleven million gallons of crude into the sound after hitting the same rock. Unlike in 1989, this time Exxon responded in timely fashion with the recovery vessel Valdez Star, which tried to skim as much of the diesel it could.
ABC quoted Alaska Daily News (ADN) reports saying;
"There's no recoverable sheen," Jim Butler, a spokesman for Crowley
Maritime Service which owns the tug, told the Anchorage Daily News
(ADN).
ADN also quoted a blog posting by Steve Lewis, president of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens Advisory Council, saying;
"Like most Alaskans, we at the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens
Advisory Council are baffled as to how the Pathfinder managed to hit
perhaps the most famous navigational hazard in the world - Bligh Reef -
in conditions of relatively mild weather."
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