Anchors Away

 

We all know the big stories of massive dumps of oil from disasters at oil rigs (like the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010) or when oil tankers run aground or hit underwater objects (like the 1989 Exxon Valdez that struck an Alaskan reef in 1989). But oil spills are par for the course even in vastly smaller ways, leaks that in the aggregate are massively destructive… often where those leaks disproportionately impact sea life. Like the risk of large anchors from bigger cargo vessels striking pipelines with potentially disastrous consequences. These pipelines are particularly common at or near big city ports.

Experts back in the 1970s pretty much wrote off that risk. They posited that the relevant harbor master, who has control over offshore anchorage when dock facilities force a delivery delay, would know where those pipelines are and make anchoring decisions accordingly. Environmental laws reinforced that requirement. Unfortunately, rough seas even off coastal anchorage areas, can derail the best laid plans of mice and men. 

This risk recently found its way to the headlines after a pipeline break off Southern California coast that was first detected on the morning of October 2nd. The spill turned out to be less than originally estimated, down from 144,000 gallons to a still nasty level, probably below 30,000 gallons. The spill occurred in federal waters at the Elly oil-rig platform, about 4 1/2 miles off Huntington Beach. The rig and pipeline are owned by Houston-based Amplify Energy. Recovery, which involved 800 workers (such as those pictured above), produced at least 5,544 gallons of oil and 13.6 barrels of tar balls. 

At first, Coast Guard investigators thought that a 4.4 earthquake might have been to blame, but that theory was quickly discredited. The growth on the fracture showed that marine life had settled on the fracture long before the quake. According to KCBS of October 8th, “Federal authorities confirmed Tuesday [10/5] that a section of Amplify Energy’s oil pipeline was damaged and moved more than 100 feet along the ocean floor, an indication that a ship’s anchor may have caused the spill.” It could have begun a long time ago. But the Coast Guard was narrowing its focus.

According to the Associated Press, October 17th: “A team of federal investigators trying to chase down the cause of the spill boarded the Panama-registered MSC DANIT just hours after the massive ship arrived this weekend off the Port of Long Beach, the same area where the leak was discovered… During a prior visit by the ship during a heavy storm in January, investigators believe its anchor dragged for an unknown distance before striking the 16-inch (40-centimeter) steel pipe, Coast Guard Lt. j.g. SondraKay Kneen said Sunday [10/17]. 

“The impact would have knocked an inch-thick concrete casing off the pipe and pulled it more than 100 feet (30 meters), bending but not breaking the line, Kneen said… Still undetermined is whether the impact caused the… leak, or if the line was hit by something else at a later date or failed due to a preexisting problem, Kneen said… ‘We're still looking at multiple vessels and scenarios,’ she said.”

Writing for the October 17th Los Angeles Times, Adam Elmahrek, Anita Chabria and Laura J. Nelson dug into the history of regulatory assumptions that may have led to this and other anchor strike caused leaks: “Regulators predicted in 1978 that a leak would result in a spill of only 50 barrels of oil, records show. That’s less than a tenth of the minimum amount of oil that leaked off the Orange County coast this month in [what] accident investigators believe was caused when a cargo ship waiting to enter the port dropped its anchor and hit the pipeline…

“A [LA] Times review of federal data shows that anchor strikes have caused pipeline ruptures that resulted in hazardous liquids spills only 17 times since 1986, but they sometimes caused devastating damage... A spill off the Texas coast in 1988 was more than 26 times the size of this month’s in California waters. Three years ago, a barge moving through the waters between the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan accidentally dropped its anchor and dragged the 12,000-pound device along the lake bed, severing two of the six underwater cables that supply power to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and damaging a third, spilling about 800 gallons of dielectric mineral oil, the National Transportation Safety Board found in a 2019 report…

“In 2018, a catastrophic anchor strike of a pipeline in Indonesian waters killed five fishermen when the oil on the surface caught fire. For Indonesian officials, the party responsible was obvious when they determined there was only one ship in the area at the time of the spill… The next year, prosecutors charged the captain of the coal carrier that struck the pipeline with violating environmental protection laws… He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.” Apparently, the 1978 anchor-strike assumption, which was clearly wrong, has never been corrected despite clear evidence of the true magnitude of the risks.

It's bad enough that burning fossil fuels for all kinds of industrial and automotive uses has resulted in that climate change accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gasses, but the direct environmental ground and sea pollution underscores the horrific price the earth has had to pay, and continues to have to pay, for our reliance on carbon-based energy generation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the penalty imposed on all of us for the luxury and economy building use of fossil fuels to power modernity is getting bigger, “badder” and far more costly than we could ever have imagined.