Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  An HH-60 Jayhawk that’s flown up from San Diego passes over the Golden Gate Bridge as we climb back aboard the response boat. The 225-foot black-hulled buoy tender Aspen has joined the blue skimmer ship in the middle of the bay where smaller boats with yellow boom lines appear to be circling a slick.

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  y Tuesday fifteen hundred people are involved in the cleanup, and I’m getting ready to fly off to Bahrain to report on the Coast Guard in Iraq. Before I leave, I head over to my local deli on the other side of the Rosie the Riveter waterfront park. By the dock in front of the deli, a 25-foot Defender and its MSST crew are hanging out, having dropped off a couple of Fish and Game biologists on nearby Baker Island.

  “Some woman just came up and gave us a piece of her mind about the oil,” one of them tells me. They go into the deli in their wraparound shades, dark blue jumpsuits, body armor, and gunslinger holsters.

  “Who are those guys?” another woman asks me.

  “Coast Guard.”

  “Really?” she replies skeptically.

  Two weeks later, when I return home from the Persian Gulf, I find twenty mostly Mexican contract workers in hazmat suits cleaning oil off the rocky shore behind my home.

  A month later, an oil barge runs into the nearby Richmond Bridge at the north end of the bay, another case of human error. Luckily no oil is spilled this time.

  Boston Oil & Gas

  If it wanted to, the Coast Guard could make a good case that it’s the oldest environmental agency in the United States. After all, the Environmental Protection Agency was only created in 1970 and the Department of the Interior in 1849, while the Revenue Cutter Service got its first resource protection assignment in 1822. That’s when Congress directed it to guard stands of live oak trees on public lands along the coast of Florida. Government warships were built using the strong, dense wood of these trees, and by the early nineteenth century timber thieves and “scoundrels” were cutting them down and shipping the lumber north. The arrival of well-armed revenue cutters discouraged the thievery.

  By the 1860s, the service was also patrolling fishing and whaling grounds off Alaska and going after seal poachers who threatened to wipe out the fur seal population on the Pribilof Islands. In addition the service provided platforms for the first naturalists and scientists to study and report on the wildlife of Alaska.

  Today the Coast Guard regulates and works to prevent oil and chemical pollution, enforces fisheries laws, protects right whales and other endangered species, tries to control the introduction of invasive species like zebra mussels by regulating ballast water exchange in ships entering U.S. ports, and is using its icebreakers as a platform for a new generation of scientists studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic.

  Sometimes it also provides platforms of opportunity for marine wildlife rescues. “I was on this 41-footer, and me and my shipmates hoisted this turtle off this fishing boat. It must have been eight feet long and eight hundred pounds. It was huge, and it took four of us to pull it over,” recalls Petty Officer Aldomoro Nelson as we’re cruising off New Jersey during a search and rescue exercise. “We thought it was dead, then on the way back in I was looking at it and it just like woke up!”

  “C’mon, you gave it mouth-to-beak resuscitation,” one of his shipmates joshes him.

  “Anyway, it looked fine, just kind of angry, so we let it go back into the water.”

  Despite the importance of the marine stewardship mission, some in the service continue to refer to strike team members and fisheries officers as “duck scrubbers” and “fish kissers,” their humor reflecting a certain macho disparagement. After all, no one on the stewardship side refers to members of the Maritime Security Response Team as “gun huggers” or surfmen as “boat tippers,” though given their relative contribution to the health of our public seas maybe they should.

  The breakup of the supertanker Torrey Canyon off the coast of England in 1967 that resulted in thirty million gallons of oil befouling the beaches of France and England alerted the U.S. Coast Guard to the threat posed by large oil tanker spills and the need for a U.S. response plan. Santa Barbara’s Union Oil platform spill in 1969 put three million gallons onto the beaches of Southern California and with the battle cry of “Get Oil Out!” helped spark the modern environmental movement. The collision of two oil tankers by the Golden Gate Bridge in 1971 resulted in close to a million-gallon spill. This led to the establishment of directed shipping lanes and creation of the first Coast Guard Vessel Traffic System in San Francisco.

  Since Congress established the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Oil Spill Prevention Act of 1990, the Coast Guard has been responsible for a range of prevention and response activities, including management of the billion-dollar Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund used for emergency cleanups and the investigation of illegal dumping at sea.

  While large vessel spills get lots of attention, oily runoff from streets and storm drains and illegal flushing of oily waste by ships puts the equivalent of one and a half Exxon Valdez oil spills into America’s waters every year. “The amount of oily wastewater being dumped in the ocean every year is just unbelievable,” says Tim Collins, deputy director of the Coast Guard Investigative Service.

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  t’s a twenty-degree day in January and I’m with three marine safety inspectors, Lt. JG Chris Herold, Bosun’s Mate Colleen Murray, and Marine Science Technician Erik Kallenstaid, doing a port state control (foreign vessel) boarding of the Romo Maersk, a 680-foot oil/chemical tanker docked by the tidal mudflats of the Global Petroleum Terminal not far from Boston’s Logan Airport.

  In 2005, the Maersk shipping company pleaded guilty to providing false documents to the Coast Guard and paid a $500,000 fine after another team of safety inspectors spotted waste oil in an overboard dump pipe on the MV Jane Maersk.

  That same year MSC, a Hong Kong–based container ship company, was forced to pay a $10.5 million fine for dumping forty tons of sludge from one of its ships, the MSC Elena, off the coast of New England using a shipboard constructed “magic pipe” to bypass its oily-waste separator and then lying about it to the Coast Guard.

  In the 1990s, Coast Guard investigations led to even larger dumping fines against the cruise ship industry, including a 1999 fine of $18 million against Royal Caribbean, which admitted to twenty-one felony counts of deliberately dumping waste oil and chemicals from its fleet of cruise ships and then lying about it to the Coast Guard.

  The biggest ship pollution fine (to date) was levied against the New York– based tanker company Overseas Shipholding Group, Inc. (OSG), in December 2006. OSG agreed to pay a record $37 million and pleaded guilty to thirty-three felonies relating to the intentional dumping of oil and doctoring of documents on a dozen of its oil tankers. The conviction was the result of a three-and-a-half-year investigation by the Coast Guard Investigative Service and the Justice Department.

  In more recent and typical cases, the British-based shipping company PACCSHIP agreed to pay a $1.7 million fine in April 2008 for illegal dumping from two of its ten ships, and that same month the Egyptian shipper National Navigation agreed to pay $7.25 million for nine years of illegal dumping from one of its ships.

  Inside Capt. Lars Christiensen’s office on the Romo Maersk, the inspectors go through the oil record book, garbage management plan, and ballast water management plan and reporting form. They look at his safety equipment certificate and certificate of financial responsibility (spill insurance).

  “Captain, your radar is down,” Colleen begins, holding another form.

  “Yes. The technician is on board. He’s fixed it.”

  “Good. Can I see that report?” she asks. These Coasties in their steel-toed boots and winter-lined hard hats are all business. Erik explains the discharge certificate for slop he’s reviewing. Slop is waste from cargo (heating oil in this case); sludge is waste from onboard machinery.

  After off-loading its heating oil, the ship will be loading up with ballast water here in B
oston Harbor and discharging it in New York Harbor. Ships don’t have to report ballast water exchanges within the two-hundred-mile Exclusive Economic Zone, even though this could be another way of spreading invasive species from one port to another.

  After a brief visit to the bridge, we head out onto the biting cold deck. “Could you get somebody down there to paint your low line mark [on the hull] so I don’t have to write it up?” Erik suggests to the ship’s chief.

  Looking over the rail, I see a rainbow sheen where water’s being flushed from the stern. Soon all three Coasties are leaning half over the rail to investigate.

  “It’s evaporating,” Colleen notes.

  “If it keeps coming, we’ll put a call in to Waterways [Management Division], as they handle pollution outside the ship,” Lt. JG Chris Herold tells me. A few more streams of water jet from the ship, but there are no more oily shimmers. Later they’ll note fresh auto lube on the propeller shaft and suspect that as the source.

  “We’ll check the shaft for any leakage,” Ship’s Chief Andreas Poulsen promises. He’s Danish but from the Faeroe Islands, he says, and yes, as a Faeroe Islander he does hunt whales, “pilot whales you call them.”

  Erik shows me the topside pump-out connectors for oily waste and sewage discharges. The waste connector has six bolts versus four for the sewage line.

  We climb down several decks and ladders into the engine room to visit the oily-waste separator. It’s about the size of an oil barrel. The main engine next to it is about the size of a Greyhound bus turned on its side. They point out the separator’s discharge valve. If a small digital detector finds more than fifteen parts per million hydrocarbons going through it, it’s supposed to set off an alarm. They ask a tall, blond, diffident Danish engineer to test it for them. A buzzer sounds and a red light starts to rotate.

  “If you want to do something bad, it’s not so hard at all,” the engineer tells me. “You could have a bypass [magic pipe] or you could run clean water through the sensor to fool it or you could have a separator without an internal filter—just run and flush it.”

  Mostly the inspectors are keyed in on the discharge valve, looking for broken paint or fresh paint on the flange or other signs of recent disturbance that could indicate use of a bypass pipe. A lot of the time it’s a whistle-blower, a mariner with a conscience, who will set off an oil dumping investigation. Whistle-blowers can also claim a percentage of any fines imposed.

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  he Exxon Valdez defined the first ten years of my career, and 9/11 is defining the next ten,” says the inspectors’ boss, Lt. Cdr. Claudia Gelzer, chief of port operations and maritime security in Boston. She joined the service in 1991, two years after the oil tanker disaster in Alaska that caught the Coast Guard, and the nation, off guard and resulted in hundreds of new marine safety officer positions being created.

  Among her tasks is maintenance of fourteen lighthouses, including Boston Light, the oldest in the United States, other aids to navigation work, port state control inspections (of foreign ships), waterways inspections, hazardous materials investigations, and icebreaking during the winter to maintain maritime mobility.

  In 2006, her crew, using forensic “fingerprinting” of oil samples, was able to identify Exxon Mobil and other companies responsible for three spills totaling over thirty thousand gallons that fouled Boston’s Chelsea River. Still, their environmental work is eclipsed by Sector Boston’s biggest, most resource-intensive task, escorting LNG ships through the harbor.

  Natural gas now meets about a quarter of the nation’s energy needs. Since it burns cleaner and emits less CO2 than other fossil fuels, demand is soaring—but for a substance that arrives in the country at 260 degrees below zero, LNG is generating a lot of heat.

  An accident or terrorist strike on a liquefied natural gas tanker carrying thirty-three million gallons of highly flammable cargo could potentially generate a fireball a third of a mile across, or at least one hellacious ship and harbor fire, burning at three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt nearby ship hulls, warehouses, and storage tanks and kill people up to a mile away.

  Boston’s is the only one of more than half a dozen existing LNG terminals set in an urban port, although there are now proposals for thirty additional sites both on- and offshore, including in urban coastal zones around New York, New Jersey, and California.

  The 2005 Energy Act gave the industry-friendly Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) final say over LNG plant sitings, overruling state authorities, although the Coast Guard can still veto a plan it feels represents a threat to maritime safety.

  In late 2007, the Coast Guard blocked a FERC-approved plan for an LNG terminal on the Fall River, Massachusetts, waterfront. Local opposition, feeling stymied by FERC, had come up with a unique plan to block the plant, winning historic landmark protection for an old drawbridge that had been slated for demolition. The narrow width of the drawbridge (ninety-eight feet) and of the gap between it and a nonaligned bridge eleven hundred feet away made navigation by big LNG tankers so risky that the Coast Guard decided it could not approve the siting.

  Still, if even a dozen new LNG terminals are approved, which seems to be industry’s real aim in proposing several dozen, the added workload for the Coast Guard could prove incredibly burdensome.

  In early 2008, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a study stating that the Coast Guard lacks the funds and training to protect LNG and crude oil tankers from terrorist attacks on a nationwide basis. “Workload demands are likely to rise substantially as new LNG facilities come on line and LNG shipments increase,” it reported. “These increased demands could cause the Coast Guard to continue to be unable to meet the standards it has set for keeping U.S. ports secure.”

  “In the early ’90s we’d have maybe five LNG shipments a year. Now it’s every five to seven days,” says Boston’s prevention chief, Tom Miller. “Each time we’ll set up a Unified Command Center and have an officer in tactical command [OTC] and a vessel movement officer on the tanker [when it’s inbound]. The Tobin Bridge is closed and air traffic held at Logan, at least the runway that could put an aircraft over the tanker. As it transits through metropolitan Boston, we have a security zone one mile ahead and two miles astern and five hundred yards to either side. We have designated ditch sites if we need to ground the vessel and different levels of response tactics [including lethal use of force]. We have a state police helicopter overhead, three 25s, an OTC boat, Mass [achusetts] Environmental, state, and Boston police boats, and police cars hopping down the transit route.”

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  ne time an LNG tanker was pulling into its Everett terminal on the Mystic River when a car crusher in the adjacent scrap metal yard got hold of a vehicle that still had fuel in its tank.

  “People heard that explosion, and it was like ‘game time’ for about ten minutes!” Eric Parker recalls excitedly. The normally laid-back twenty-five-year-old African American lieutenant, five-nine and lanky, is the Officer in Tactical Command [OTC] the day I ride along on an outbound escort.

  The huge 933-foot black, white, and red LNG tanker Catalunya Spirit lets out a billow of steam approaching the high-rises of downtown Boston. From our position to its rear, it looks like a mushroom cloud.

  Along with its escort tugs and our 41-foot OTC boat, there’s another 41 and a 25, both with lights energized and machine guns manned, as well as a couple of armed Massachusetts and Boston police boats.

  A ferry calls on the radio for clearance to pass behind us. I see a police truck and then a patrol car on shore with their blue lights flashing. We follow the tanker out past the airport, the Legal Sea Foods plant, and a shipping dock where another patrol car is sitting, flashing its blue lights. A jet flies overhead but not over the ship.

  We continue out past Fort Independence on Castle Island into the shipping channel and past Spectacle Island, where a lot of the fill from Boston’s Big Dig ended up. The Boston Harbor ferry calls for clearance to pass behind
us. “They just want to make sure they can go through without getting shot,” Eric explains. We’re now close to Boston Light. The Unified Command calls on the radio. “We’ll wait to hear back from you before we scoot,” Eric tells them.

  Out past Deer Island, the last tug veers away from the tanker, followed by our security detail.

  Back at the North End Coast Guard station, whose headquarters building looks like it’s made out of white LEGO blocks (it’s supposed to look like a ship’s bridge), Chief Warrant Officer Don Tucker shows me his Hawkeye monitors. They’re linked to ten powerful cameras spread around Boston Harbor.

  “We watched you the whole way out,” he says, pointing to a monitor showing the LNG tanker now 7.5 miles beyond Deer Island. You can’t quite read its name on the stern but can still identify the unique profile and colors of the big ship.

  Six months later, a computer control problem will leave the Catalunya Spirit drifting powerless off Cape Cod for five hours with a full load of LNG on board. The Coast Guard gets a tug out to it that then tows it under armed escort to a safe anchorage for repair.

  Along with LNG, the Coast Guard is also evaluating the safety of offshore wind farms like ones proposed off Cape Cod and Delaware, as well as other alternative ocean energy systems such as tidal, current, and wave power generators. They’ve found that the big wind farm turbines create radar blind spots that might make good hideouts for oyster pirates and bad places to do search and rescue. On the other hand, no coastal ecosystem has ever been wiped out by a wind spill.