THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 29, 1996 TAG: 9604270250
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER DINSMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ABOARD THE VIRGINIA RESPONDER LENGTH: Long : 177 lines
This ship has never seen any action, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who hopes it will.
The Virginia Responder spends most of the time lashed to a pier on Little Creek in Virginia Beach. Once a week it goes out to train for its mission - cleaning up the environmental disaster of an oil spill.
Financed by big oil companies, Marine Spill Response Corp. operates 16 vessels like the Virginia Responder throughout the nation just in case.
It's not an inexpensive operation. The fleet, including the vessels, tank barges, skimmers and booms, cost about $400 million to build and has an annual operating budget of nearly $95 million. A Washington-based nonprofit, Marine Spill Response employs about 425 people.
It was created by the oil industry in response to the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which required oil and gas shippers to have a detailed plan to deal with any spill. The Oil Pollution Act itself was Congress' response to the huge Exxon Valdez oil spill, which dumped more 200,000 barrels of crude in to Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.
``As an industry we committed ourselves six years ago to the best spill response we could develop,'' said Gerhard Kurz, president of Mobil Shipping and Transportation Co., the shipping arm of the Fairfax-based oil giant Mobil Corp., which owns 35 tankers and charters about 35 more worldwide.
``We have a unique capability,'' said Kurz, who is also chairman of the Marine Preservation Association, which collects dues for Marine Spill Response. ``When you're moving oil through U.S. waters, you have a responsibility to maintain the best possible response on standby. Nobody in the country has our standby capability.''
Unfortunately some oil shippers don't share Mobil's commitment, Kurz said. About 25 percent of the original membership, including such big oil companies as Sunoco, Atlantic Richfield Co. and Crown Central Corp., has quit the organization due to high costs and lax enforcement by the Coast Guard of the Oil Pollution Act's requirements, he said.
``Many of the guys can afford to leave because they know when push comes to shove, the Coast Guard will call us,'' Kurz said. ``If something happens, it will be indefensible.''
To make itself more competitive, Marine Spill Response is working to halve its budget by next year without sacrificing its standby capability, Kurz said. The budget cuts are coming mostly out of research and the headquarters staff, not the fleet, he said.
Marine Spill Response hasn't had to clean up a spill of anywhere near the Exxon Valdez magnitude yet, but they have worked several smaller spills, including the January wreck of a heating oil barge off Rhode Island and a spill of crude oil off Galveston, Texas, last month.
``Our client base pays dues for the luxury of using us in their response plans as mandated by'' the Oil Pollution Act, said Darnell Lawrence, Marine Spill Response's Virginia Beach section leader.
Clients include Mobil, Amoco and Exxon, all of which have facilities in Hampton Roads. Dues are based on the number of barrels the clients transport.
The fleet of Responders, mostly named after the state they're based in, was put in place in 1993. In addition to Virginia Beach on the East Coast, Marine Spill Response has ships in Portland, Maine, Edison, N.J., Delaware City, Del., Savannah, Ga., Miami and St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. There are four ships along the Gulf Coast, four along the Pacific Coast and one in Hawaii.
Environmentalists are glad the fleet exists, but wonder why it took a devastating spill and an act of Congress to get the oil companies to create it. Before Marine Spill Response was created, the nation had little capability to respond to catastrophic spills.
Crude oil and refined oil products are the largest imports to the port of Hampton Roads. In 1994 nearly 4 million tons of oil, gas and related products were shipped in to the port, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.
Much of that goes to Amoco's Yorktown refinery. Most of the rest goes to terminals and tanks along the Elizabeth River, particularly along the Southern Branch.
Last year 169 tankers arrived to deliver petroleum products in the port. Many other shipments arrived and departed by barge.
The rocky coasts and harbor bottoms common elsewhere in the country can hole ships, but thanks to this harbor's sandy, silty, muddy bottom, oil spills are less likely here, said Robert Blomerth, the Virginia Responder's captain.
A collision is far more likely to cause a spill, Blomerth said. ``This is a very busy port,'' he said. Such a spill occurred in 1990 when the freighters Neptune Jade and Columbus America collided, dumping 30,000 gallons of fuel into the Chesapeake Bay and Elizabeth River.
Numerous small spills occur too. About 3,200 spills dumped nearly 2.7 million gallons of petroleum products into the Bay between 1980 and 1989, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Most spills are small, so the Responder stays in port. It's designed to handle the largest spills efficiently.
The Virginia Responder is just one part of the region's spill clean-up fleet. Several local companies, such as Industrial Marine Service Inc., provide clean-up services, and the Navy has a fleet of spill response vessels too.
The Virginia Responder would be called on to handle large spills in Chesapeake Bay as far north as the Potomac River, Lawrence said. It's coverage area stretches along the coast from Cape Hatteras to the Virginia/Maryland border. It would also support a neighboring Responder on a larger spill.
The state-of-the-art ship is 210 feet long and displaces about 2,000 tons. It needs 14 feet of water to operate in. In shallower water, the Responder will anchor in the channel and send its boats to run the oil-collecting booms out.
The vessels are operated by Dyn Marine Services, a unit of Reston-based DynCorp, under contract from Marine Spill Response. Dyn Marine provides the vessel crews.
The Responders had some labor difficulties early on. The vessels' crews voted to join the Seafarer's International Union, but Dyn Marine wouldn't negotiate with the union, a union source said. The matter is now settled.
Marine Spill Response provides the responders, the men and women who actually handle the spill and the equipment aboard the ships.
The Virginia Responder has a regular complement of eight crew and seven responders.
The crew all carry pagers and are on a 2-hour recall status. In the event of a spill, they are supposed to be aboard the ship and underway within two hours. ``We did it one Friday afternoon when everybody was stuck in traffic, but we got it out,'' Blomerth said.
The Responder won't get to a spill in a hurry, but once it's there it can stay a while. Its two 1,250 horsepower engines will only get it up to about 12 nautical miles per hour. However, with fuel stores of more than 100,000 gallons, it can stay on site for up to 20 days.
When the Responder arrives at a spill, it releases a floating boom that pays out and is picked up by a small aluminum-hulled work boat the ship carries. The Responder and the boat drag the boom across the spill, collecting oil in a pocket.
That oil is then sucked up by a skimmer and brought aboard the Responder. The skimmer can suck up to 2,200 barrels an hour.
The mixture of oil and water is placed in one of four 1,000-barrel tanks. The tanks are heated to help the oil rise to the surface.
The water is then run through one of two oil/water separators that filter out remaining oil particles before the water is blown overboard.
The separators clean the water to less than 10 parts per million, which exceeds federal standards,
The oil is stored in the tanks aboard the Responder or is pumped to a tank barge that can hold up to 80,000 barrels.
Life aboard the Virginia Responder is pretty routine. The crew spends most of its time maintaining the vessel. ``It's a lot like being on a fire boat, the boat's got to be 100 percent ready, 100 percent of the time,'' Blomerth said. ILLUSTRATION: [Cover, Color photo]
A DIRTY JOB
MIKE HEFFNER
The Virginian-Pilot
THE VIRGINIA RESPONDER
Length: 210 feet
Beam: 44 feet
Deadweight: 499 tons
Displacement: 2,000 tons
Draft: 14 feet
Top speed: 12 knots
Crew: Sleeps about 40, underway crew of 12, plus oil spill
responders
Auxiliary boats: one aluminum Munson boat and two rigid-hull
inflatables
Helipad can handle a Bell Jet Ranger
Automated, unattended engine room features two 1,250 horsepower
engines and three 250 kilowatt generators. The Responder also has a
500 horsepower bow thruster
Automated bridge operated by officer and lookout with fore and
aft views
Built by Trinity Marine Group in Louisiana
Delivered 1993
[Color Photos]
MIKE HEFFNER
The Virginian-Pilot
Capt. Robert Blomerth, above, walks between the Virginia Responder's
two oil-water separators. The machines can purify up to 500 gallons
of water an hour, leaving it purer than federal standards require.
The Responder's oil skimmer, left, floats near the ship at dock. The
skimmer can suck oil from a spill through this hose into the ship at
up to 2,200 barrels an hour. The Responder can operate with a
limited crew because it is highly automated - its engine room is
unattended and its bridge is run by two crew members who control the
ship at the touch of a button.
by CNB