By Chom Greacen of Lopez NO COALition
Special to the Islands’ Weekly
San Olson, a former Naval Officer serving on a 455-foot-long Amphibious Assault ship, recently shared his expertise and perspectives on coal shipping risks with an audience on Lopez. He serves on the Steering Committee of SSASS, a trans-border coalition for the purpose of protecting the Salish Sea from adverse maritime impacts.
Here are ten eye-opening facts from Olson’s talk.
1. The Pacific Northwest is becoming a world class fossil fuel transshipment center for Asian markets. There are currently over 2,000 vessels transiting our waters, and 1,700 more if the Cherry Point Coal Terminal is approved and the Vancouver tar-sands pipeline is expanded as planned. The more vessels plying our waters, the greater the potential for oil spills.
2. Our tranquil San Juan Islands are in the dead center of this shipping hubbub! All vessels carrying coal or oil from eight existing/planed ports from Vancouver to Cherry Point and Anacortes will pass through either Haro or Rosario Straits, essentially circumnavigating our islands.
3. The passages around the San Juans are narrow and hazardous. Rosario Strait shipping channel is only a half a mile. Haro strait is wider (one and one-eighth of a mile) but at Stewart Island, ships must make a 70 degree turn in a channel less than two miles wide with shoal and Arachne Reef just to the west. Several other shoals and reefs lie within a half to one and three-fourth mile from the middle of the two channels.
4. Coal carriers, tankers and container ships are getting bigger and BIGGER and are thus trickier to maneuver. For comparison, one New Panamax ship is equal to 34 Super Class (“Elwha”) ferries in gross tonnage, bigger than the largest aircraft carriers (about three football fields long). Big ships require great distance to turn or change course. If power was lost, the stopping distance would be on the order of five to seven miles.
5. Miscommunication could be an issue leading to maneuvering miscalculations since 75 percent of the ships in our waters are of Greek, Japanese, Chinese or Panamanian registry and so the captain and crew may have limited understanding of English.
6. All bulk carriers are single propeller, single-hulled (except the bottom for structural support) and are not required to have a tug escort. Each coal carrier may carry up to two million gallons of heavy oil as fuel. Oil spills from coal carriers do happen as in the recent case of a Chinese coal ship running aground in Australian reefs spilling four tons of oil in April 2011.
7. Fifty-four percent of “Ship Endangerment” situations are to due to engineering, rudder and propeller malfunctions. And 59 percent of the vessels which received high, very high or extremely high risk scores were bulk carriers, according to an inspection in 1995 by Washington Office of Marine Safety. The trend is likely worsened since due to cost cutting measures on maintenance and crew.
8. In event of navigational or engine trouble, the nearest designated rescue tug is at Neah Bay, six to seven hours away at top speed. Our local oil spill responder, Islands’ Oil Spill Association, has limited resources that would be rapidly overwhelmed by a spill from a large injured vessel.
9. A hypothetical spill of 65,000 barrels (25 percent of the largest expected outflow from a Suezmax tanker) in Rosario Strait area would cost $128 million, 2.6 times the San Juan County’s 2011 budget. The modeled socioeconomic and environmental impacts include damage to private property, parks, commerce and mortality of wildlife (29,000 deaths from birds alone). Even without the horror of an oil spill, 180 decibel noise from vessel engines, along with bioaccumulated toxins may spell doom for our resident orcas.
10. The U.S. is subsidizing China’s use of coal (Bureau of Land Management sells mineral rights to Montana coal at a fraction of world market price) and thereby condemns our children and grandchildren to a much more violent climate.
The plan to export coal at Cherry Point seems like an ecological and economic time bomb for the San Juans and beyond. We have very little to gain and much to lose. The scoping process has just started. It’s time to act to register every concern we might have.
