Rescue tugs to monitor hot spots

The U.S. Coast Guard will "pre-position" rescue tugs at congested and dangerous spots in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and inland marine waters, under a plan announced this morning.

The Coast Guard also is using a cash infusion from Congress to install new weather and wind sensors as well as to plug into the Canadian coast guard's vessel traffic support system, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said.

The Coast Guard will use such criteria as the intensity of vessel traffic and the weather conditions to decide when and where to pre-position the tugs.

NOTE: This article has been updated since it was originally published in the newspaper.

The new safety measures mark the latest upgrades in what has been a 30-year debate over measures to anticipate and prevent accidents in sensitive marine waters that are host to some of the world's most-used shipping lanes.

The debate has been fueled by such highly publicized incidents as the grounding and break up of the New Carissa off the Oregon coast two years ago and accidents in 1988 and 1990 that put oil on beaches in both Olympic National Park and Canada's Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island.

Murray said pre-positioning will allow tugs to be available at such hazardous spots as Tern Point in Haro Strait, a major shipping lane into Vancouver that is also a center of recreational boating on the U.S.-Canadian border.

"They will be able to put a tug up there without first receiving a trouble call from a ship," Murray said. "Ship operators can be reluctant to call the Coast Guard and say they are in trouble -- they have to pay for the tug."

A leading environmental critic of the Coast Guard, Fred Fellemen of Ocean Advocates, questioned whether pre-positioning would bring any benefits to marine safety.

"You are basically trying to schedule accident prevention," Fellemen said. "We don't have the ability to predict dangerous situations. The Coast Guard's data is so poor."

By plugging into the Canadian coast guard's information base, however, its American counterpart probably will get a better picture of some much traveled waters.

The Canadian coast guard monitors Harrow Strait from a high vantage point on lower Vancouver Island, whereas there are obstructed points that the U.S. Coast Guard gets from Lummi Island.

The marine safety debate probably will go on, however, fueled by a new infusion of cruise ships into Puget Sound.

A quarter-century ago, against furious oil-industry opposition, Sen. Warren Magnuson sneaked through an amendment that banned oil supertankers from waters east of Port Angeles and required tug escorts for smaller tankers after they passed Dungeness Spit. But marine traffic has increased, and debate over marine safety has focused on the 70 miles of the Strait of Juan de Fuca west from Port Angeles to Cape Flattery.

The state of Washington currently pays to station a rescue tug at Neah Bay, near the mouth of the strait, during the late fall and winter season when storms off the Pacific batter the northwest coast. Still, such groups as People for Puget Sound want to go further and require that the tug not only be equipped to aid ships in distress, but also have extensive firefighting and oil-spill response capability such as is the case in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

In Washington, the rate of spills, collisions, losses of power and similar red flags increased substantially in the past few years. Whereas one out of every 66 large commercial vessels entering state waters encountered such problems in 1998, by 2001 the figure had risen to one out of every 42, state records show.

Since 1994, 162 ships have lost propulsion and 43 have lost steering in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and waters near the San Juan Islands. Nine collisions have been reported.

The shipping industry, extensively staffed by retired Coast Guard officers, has defended the advocacy of what it calls a tug-of-opportunity system. It mandates that, when a ship's distress call comes, the nearest available tug responds to the call immediately.

It has fallen to Murray, who holds Magnuson's old Senate seat, to mediate among the environmentalists, the Coast Guard and shippers in one of the Northwest's most enduring safety debates.