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One of the world’s worst oil spills, the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska,
might never have happened if the US had been enforcing the environmental
safeguards that protect Scotland and Norway from such catastrophes. Or so
says Frederika Ott, an Alaskan marine biologist and environmental campaigner.
Earlier this year Ott completed a study of the oil industries of Alaska,
Shetland and west Norway for the Alaska Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council.
She looked at oil terminals along latitude 60 degrees North, where weather
conditions are similar. Alaskan authorities have now begun to act on her
findings and on the recommendations of other researchers who have criticised
the way the oil industry manages its operations in the region.

Ott’s qualifications include a commercial fishing licence for the waters
of Prince William Sound, where the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled an estimated
40 000 tonnes of Alaskan crude oil on 24 March 1989. Her concern about the
risks that the oil industry, the state of Alaska and the US Coast Guard
were taking predates the spill. On the night of the accident she was addressing
a public meeting in the oil town of Valdez, which sits within Prince William
Sound, predicting catastrophic pollution if nothing were done.

BP is the majority shareholder in Alyeska, the company that runs the
oil terminal at Valdez. It also operates the terminal at Sullom Voe, Shetland,
which is Europe’s biggest crude oil export terminal. And yet, at the time
of the disaster, antipollution safeguards at the two terminals were substantially
different.

Dan Lawn, the State of Alaska’s pollution watchdog responsible for the
Valdez terminal in March 1989, blamed BP, Exxon and the other oil companies
after he visited Sullom Voe and Norway’s Sture terminal in October 1989,
and saw how the oil companies operated there. He says the Exxon Valdez spill
would never have happened if the oil industry had been applying the same
standards in Valdez. Congressman George Miller of California, who chaired
the first inquiry into the Alaska disaster, endorsed Lawn’s criticisms and
accused the industry of double standards. He says the industry should have
informed Alaska about the more stringent procedures it operated elsewhere.

Special safety measures have been implemented at Sullom Voe since 1979.
They were devised by the Sullom Voe Association, which controls Sullom Voe
and represents both the oil industry and the Shetland Islands Council. The
oil companies voluntarily agreed to impose the SVA safety code on their
customers-those that broke the rules were not allowed back.

Mike Williams, vice-president of Alyeska, rejects direct comparisons
between Valdez and Sullom Voe. For a start, he says, the State of Alaska
does not have the powers of the Shetland council so it could not have enforced
a similar regulatory regime. He also argues that, even before the Exxon
Valdez disaster, Valdez was better equipped than Sullom Voe to handle spills
of more than 2000 tonnes. He adds that Alyeska has always met all state
and federal regulations; BP says that it, too, observes all government rules
in Scotland.

Lawn contrasts what he sees as the lax attitude of the state and federal
regulatory agencies in the US, with the fiercely environmentalist stand
taken by the Shetland Islands Council. There have been no major spills in
Sullom Voe since port safety procedures were tightened up, after the tanker
Esso Bernicia lost 1174 tonnes of bunker fuel in a collision with a jetty
in December 1978. Since the Exxon Valdez disaster, Sullom Voe has implemented
further safety measures.

The people of Prince William Sound are looking to the Shetland community
for help. Last September, the Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, set up
in 1990 to bring Shetland-style public participation to the running of the
Valdez terminal, asked Jim Dickson, the Shetland council’s oil pollution
control officer, to visit them. Dickson says that from what he knew about
the standards operating before the disaster, antipollution systems at Valdez
and Prince William Sound have improved a lot since then. But he thinks the
chances of oil spills could be reduced even further by adopting nine key
points of Sullom Voe practice. Alyeska and the US Coast Guard say this is
not so easy.

In Shetland, aerial surveillance acts as ‘a policeman on the beat’ to
make sure that ships are where they say they are and that they are not leaking
oil. Sullom Voe’s small helicopter also lands pilots on ships when launches
cannot operate because of bad weather. In Alaska, the harbour pilots say
this is too hazardous. According to Ed Thompson, the US Coast Guard’s port
captain at Valdez, serious icing problems make the coast of Alaska a very
hostile environment for helicopters. He also points out that the distance
from the terminal to the open sea is much greater than at Sullom Voe (more
than 90 miles, compared with 14 miles). But he adds that using fixed-wing
aircraft for surveillance is being considered.

Compared with Valdez, Sullom Voe uses more and better tugs to keep the
huge ships under control in confined waters. Also, the wind speed at which
it stops ships berthing and loading is lower. Thompson says that berthing
at Valdez is now not allowed in wind speeds of more than 40 knots. In the
past, ships have berthed in wind speeds of up to 70 knots.

In Shetland, there are better moorings to stop ships being blown off
loading jetties during storms. A detailed mooring plan is drawn up for every
ship, after two alarming incidents in 1982 and 1990 when tankers were torn
from the jetty and damaged crude oil loading arms. Thompson says the prevailing
winds at Valdez make this less of a problem.

Valdez now follows the practice at Sullom Voe in checking inert gas
systems to prevent explosions in tankers. Both make random checks on the
oxygen levels in every ship’s tanks, and vessels that cannot get the oxygen
level below eight per cent are not allowed to load cargo.

Valdez has improved its safety inspection rules, but they are still
less stringent than Sullom Voe’s and are mainly carried out by Alyeska,
the operator of the oil terminal, rather than by the coastguard. Tankers
approaching Shetland must telex or radio detailed safety checklists from
200 miles out. The port authority requires further exhaustive checklists,
covering dozens of items, before ships are allowed to berth, load or depart.

Dickson says there should be more crew on tankers to counter excessive
working hours. Exxon and some other shippers from Valdez have hired extra
staff.

At Sullom Voe, the port authority employs former tanker captains as
both harbour pilots and traffic controllers. Thompson describes this as
‘overkill’. In Valdez the pilots are self-employed contractors hired by
the shipping companies, while coastguard officers control traffic in the
port.

New laws are required to give greater powers to a new Valdez port authority.
This is proving to be one of the most difficult issues to resolve in Alaska.
In Shetland a single authority, Shetland Islands Council, controls the port
and its approaches, and owns the loading jetties and the land on which the
terminal is built. It also has a major stake in the tug company. BP operates
the oil terminal on behalf of about 30 oil companies and provides extra
resources to contain spills and clean them up.

In Valdez responsibilities are divided between Alyeska as terminal and
jetty operator, the coastguard as port controller and the state of Alaska
as regulatory authority. Some critics say that this led to the confusion
that contributed to the stranding of the Exxon Valdez. A single port authority
would require Congress to remove some powers from the US Coast Guard, a
federal agency responsible for many other marine matters. The Shetland Islands
Council, representing 23 000 islanders, functions efficiently as a harbour
authority. The town of Valdez, with only a tenth of the population, might
not cope so well.

The Norwegian oil industry provides more evidence of the deficiencies
at Valdez. Ott found Statoil, Norsk Hydro and government representatives
candid about their operations, openly admitting mistakes and the failure
of drills to test antipollution equipment. Unlike either Alaska or Shetland,
they test booms and skimmers in near gale-force winds for recovery of real,
weathered oil. They contract fishermen to use their towing skills in handling
booms and skimmers-something that Alyeska now does too. And the Norwegian
government’s requirements for oil spill recovery equipment are far higher.
Spraying chemical dispersants is a last resort, not the first line of defence
when the weather gets rough.

Ott contrasts ‘episodic’ American research on cleanup gear, which typically
occurs after a major spill, with the Norwegians, who are constantly researching
and testing better cleanup equipment, often revising downwards the manufacturers’
estimates of what their equipment can do. Norwegian researchers are now
concentrating on improving booms.

She also rates highly the Norwegians’ stockpiles of equipment along
their 1650-mile coastline, their use of personal computers on ships to predict
the movement of slicks in the open sea, the versatile tugs-as in Sullom
Voe-and the application of the ‘polluter pays’ principle, the lack of which
has embroiled the state of Alaska and hundreds of individuals there in law
cases since the Exxon Valdez ran aground.

Norway’s oil spill drill

Norwegians have not always shared Ott’s enthusiasm for their country’s
State Pollution Authority (SFT) and its system for dealing with spills,
however. Seven months after the Exxon Valdez disaster, a Brazilian bulk
carrier, the Mercantil Marica, broke up in a gale off Sogn Fjord. SFT’s
booms proved useless against several hundred tonnes of fuel oil spilt. The
rigorous spill drills reported by Ott after her visit to Norway at the end
of last year appear to reflect lessons learned during the Mercantil Marica
incident.

Neither does Sullom Voe get an entirely clean bill of health from Ott’s
report. Donald Button, a microbiologist at the University of Alaska, is
studying how oil reacts in the sea with bacteria to produce long-lasting,
toxic by-products. He accompanied Ott and was not impressed with the quality
of the laboratory equipment used at Sullom Voe to detect hydrocarbon levels
in treated ballast water from tankers. BP says the equipments meets all
the requirements of the UK government.

Ott and Button are concerned that non-hydrocarbon pollutants, such as
heavy metals, could be picked up with apparently clean ballast water by
tankers sailing from polluted rivers such as the Rhine. These pollutants
could pass undetected through plants treating ballast water at oil terminals.

During Alaskan Congressional hearings last month, BP, Exxon and other
oil shippers admitted that tankers returning to Valdez sometimes carry contaminated
ballast water from other sources. But they deny that significant pollution
reaches the sea from the Valdez terminal, and they say the ballast water
treatment plant can cope. Since 1988 Valdez harbour, which was untouched
by the disaster, has been classed by the EPA as a ‘toxic impaired waterway’
because of pollution from the oil terminal.

No one is sure about the effect of chronic, low-level discharges of
hydrocarbons from ballast water treatment plants. In Shetland, BP now routinely
reduces the amount of oil in water to five parts per million-after many
years of discharging higher concentrations. The company says that data from
13 years of monitoring show that the terminal has no effect on the marine
environment.

Ott concludes: ‘Our European neighbours are clearly superior in oil
spill pre-vention and response, in terms of organisation, equipment, training
and, most importantly, attitude. In Europe, oil spills are accepted as one
of the risks associated with national dependency on oil. The industry in
both Scotland and Norway is serious about minimising risk of oil spills,
even to the extent of postponing oil field exploration until the proper
cleanup technology is developed, and they are serious about cleaning up
spills once they occur. In Alaska and the US the industry treats oil spills
like a total accident: ‘We’re sorry. It won’t happen again.’ This is a ridiculous
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Dickson, of the Shetland Islands Council, says prevention is the best
and often the only cure for oil pollution, particularly in high latitudes
where winter storms, short days and low sea temperatures make cleaning up
spills impossible.

A key part of prevention is knowing where tankers are. A major cause
of the Exxon Valdez disaster was poor surveillance. The ship was not seen
on Valdez port radar when it strayed off course. In Sullom Voe, radar screens
would have been monitored continuously, and automatic alarms would have
sounded in the port’s control office. Over the past 12 years, surveillance
equipment in Shetland has forestalled several disasters that could have
matched the Exxon Valdez incident.

The port of Valdez has improved its surveillance by installing radar
to provide long-range cover of the port approaches-as far as 25 miles out,
where Exxon Valdez came to grief. But long-range radar does not always work
in bad weather and so the US Coast Guard plans to put transponders on tankers,
linked to the satellites of the Global Positioning System.

Shetland Islands Council is watching the Alaskan GPS tests closely,
uncomfortably aware that there is still a very large radar blind spot on
the dangerous northwest coast of the islands. If the system works for Valdez,
Shetland will almost certainly follow suit, and disasters on the scale of
the Exxon Valdez may become no more than a bad memory on latitude 60 degrees
North.

Jonathan Wills is a freelance writer and broadcaster based in Shetland.
His book on Shetland, Alaska and oil. A Place In The Sun, is due to be published
this month by the Memoria University of Newfoundland and by Mainstream Publishing,
Edinburgh.