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Collection: The Risk of Northwest Oil Spills

Columbia River Ship Traffic: the Impact of Coal and Oil Plans

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Like the Salish Sea, the Columbia River is threatened by the risks of oil spills. If you need proof of the risk, look no further than the historical record of major spills or the dozens of recent close calls on the river. In fact, the Coast Guard sector responsible for the region that includes Grays Harbor plus the Columbia and Snake Rivers responds to 275 oil pollution incidents in a typical year.

Yet the risk of spills could soon increase dramatically. If they are built, new fossil fuel shipment proposals would result in huge increases to both oil and other petroleum ship movements, as well as to overall large vessel traffic on the Columbia River.

Using the Washington Department of Ecology’s “Vessel Transit and Entry Counts” database, we calculate the average volume of ship and barge traffic over the last decade and compared that to the number of vessel trips that would be induced by newly built and planned fossil fuel sites in the region.

The result? We find that new crude oil and petroleum product facilities could triple the number of tank vessels—tanker ships and tank barges—crossing the Columbia River’s notoriously dangerous bar.

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Salish Sea Ship Traffic: the Impact of Coal and Oil Plans

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The Northwest’s most important waters are under a near-constant threat of oil spills. It’s a fact made plain by the historical record of major spills and the dozens of recent close calls, as well as the best available data and modeling analysis of oil spills risks.

Yet the risk of spills could soon increase, perhaps dramatically. A spate of new fossil fuel shipment proposals could well generate very large increases in both oil transport and overall vessel traffic in places like the Salish Sea. To provide a clearer picture of what’s ahead, we crunched the numbers. Using the Washington Department of Ecology’s “Vessel Transit and Entry Counts” database, we calculate the average volume of ship and barge traffic over the last decade in contrast that to the number of vessel trips that would be induced by newly-built and planned fossil fuel sites in the region.

The result? We find that new crude oil facilities could create a 40 percent increase in the number of tank vessels—tanker ships and tank barges—crossing the Salish Sea.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.
Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

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Northwest Oil Spills: The Raw Data and the Growing Risk

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When most people think of an oil spill, they imagine something like the Exxon Valdez grounding. While it’s certainly possible that a mishap of that magnitude could occur in the Northwest, the truth is most oil spills are far more mundane. They are also much more frequent, and arguably more damaging, than you might think.

Take Puget Sound, for example. During the 38-month span from December 2009 to January 2013, there were 757 confirmed spills in the Sound—nearly 20 per month. Accidental bilge discharges, overfilling fuel tanks, and a rather surprising number of vessels sinking—four different pleasure boats sank and spilled oil in December 2011 alone—are common. Every now and again we might here about a peculiar one, like the 416 gallons spilled when crews loaded diesel into a leaky tank barge or the 36 crushed cars that fell into Commencement Bay, but most often they receive little media attention.

The raw data show that vessels in Puget Sound are a steady source of oil contamination.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.
Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

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Northwest Ships: Near Misses and Almost-Spills

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The Northwest is evaluating more than a dozen major projects that would add oil tankers and other major cargo ships to the region’s waters. Nearly all of these plans would affect Washington’s waters: either on the Columbia River, Grays Harbor, or in the labyrinthine channels of the Salish Sea. In the simplest terms, increasing ship traffic means increasing risk. And as the region is contemplating an astonishing jump in vessel traffic, it’s worth pausing to examine the record.

As with actual oil spills, near misses are frighteningly common. Natural phenomena, like winds and tides, compound human blunders to result in collisions and groundings (and narrowly averted ones). Alongside these mishaps are countless instances of mechanical failure. They do not always spill oil, but the risk is nearly omnipresent.

For example? In the months of November and December 2011 alone, large bulk or container vessels, often carrying hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel oil in single-hulled tanks, experienced nine separate incidences of mechanical failure or a loss of propulsion in Washington waterways. During that same two-month period, three different laden oil tankers drifted into dangerous collision courses with other vessels, prompting Coast Guard authorities to intervene. Indeed, episodes of tank vessels straying into the path of oncoming traffic, and vice versa, occur with startling regularity, spared only by Coast Guard operators hundreds of miles away who happen to notice an unusual blip on their screens.

Oil Tankers Inbound by Pieter Van Marion (CC)
Oil Tankers Inbound by Pieter Van Marion used under CC BY-NC 2.0

In other cases, the catastrophes were not so much averted as simply avoided by blind luck. Had events unfolded just a bit differently, Washington’s most important waterways would been subjected to another major spill.

Below is an abridged collection of cases when things very nearly went very wrong.

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Fifty Years of Oil Spills in Washington’s Waters

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Washington’s coastlines and waterways are at a threshold. Battered by a legion of insults—polluted runoff, shoreline development, carbon-induced acidification, and more—there is no guarantee that the Northwest can continue to support the vibrant natural systems it is known for. The region’s native orcas are struggling; key populations of shellfish and herring may be dying out; and even its flagship species, the salmon, are endangered in many places. And what is perhaps the biggest threat of all looms like a specter: a catastrophic oil spill.

Every day the region faces the risk of an oil spill. Though Washington officials have been more diligent in their preparations than their counterparts elsewhere, there is good reason to believe we are not prepared. In fact, a review of the record shows that our business-as-usual approach has let us down at many times and in many places.

Certainly, we are not up to the task of protecting Northwest waters from the titanic increases in oil transport planned by pipeline companies, refineries, and would-be exporters. To understand why, it helps to recall our history lessons. The fact is that Washington has already suffered numerous damaging spills.

Here are a few of the worst.

Pacific Coast (March 1964)

A tugboat towing a barge loaded with gasoline from the Ferndale refineries was making a delivery run down the outer coast to Coos Bay, Oregon when the tow line ran off its winch drum during a storm in the middle of the night. Set adrift, the 200-foot barge, which was carrying 2,352,000 gallons of gasoline, diesel, and stove oil, soon grounded on a sandbar several hundred yards offshore between Moclips and Pacific Beach, just south of the Quinault Indian Reservation.

Rough surf pounded the stranded barge and stymied the Coast Guard’s initial efforts to pull it free. It took more than five days, and the assistance of another tug dispatched from Grays Harbor, before workers were finally able to move the barge off the bar, but while they struggled 1.2 million gallons of petroleum leaked into the water. The spill fouled beaches from the Quinault Reservation south for 10 miles, killing untold numbers of seabirds. Wildlife researchers also reported massive shellfish deaths: 32,000 pounds of razor clams were killed by the spill, and officials immediately closed clam digging everywhere north of the Copalis River.

In an out-of-court settlement, the United Transportation Company eventually agreed to pay $8,000 in damages—about $61,000 in today’s dollars.

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What Happened When a Hazardous Substance Train Derailed on a Puget Sound Beach

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If you’ve ever wondered how an oil train derailment might go down on the shores of Puget Sound, it might look a bit like the winter night derailment in 2011 that spilled sodium hydroxide on a beach at Chambers Bay south of Tacoma. It was hardly the kind of disaster that has resulted from oil trains derailing, but it still makes for a rather instructive lesson in how these things happen.

Sodium hydroxide, more commonly known as lye, is used as a chemical base in the production of pulp and paper, textiles, drain cleaners, and other products. (It’s also the major ingredient that makes lutefisk unpalatable.) It’s caustic, corrosive to metal and glass, and it can cause fairly serious burns. You want to be careful handling it but—notably unlike the volatile shale oil traveling daily on the very same rail line—it does not erupt into 300-foot-tall fireballs.

If it had been an oil train, things could have been much, much worse.

Chambers Bay derailment by WA Ecology_2
Image by Washington Department of Ecology

What happened is this: around 8 pm on February 26, 2011, a north-bound freight train derailed, sideswiping a south-bound train that was carrying (among other things) four loaded tank cars of sodium hydroxide in a liquid solution. One of those cars was damaged in the collision and leaked a relatively modest 50 gallons onto the beach before response crews plugged the leak.

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