Spill soils South Sound

TACOMA -- At dawn today, dozens of emergency workers will resume efforts to contain an oil slick that has already fouled 15 miles of beach on Vashon and Maury islands.

As workers tried unsuccessfully to stem the spread of the oil last night, investigators worked feverishly to home in on the mystery vessel responsible for the spill -- and state officials faced a rising tide of questions about why it took more than nine hours to begin cleanup operations.

The spill, first reported at 1:15 a.m. yesterday between Vashon and Tacoma's Commencement Bay, polluted an area that is home to one of the largest herring populations in Puget Sound and the wintering grounds for Western grebes, a seabird whose numbers have plummeted locally.

While many questions surrounding the spill remained, some environmentalists and residents were certain of one thing: Spill-response officials moved too slowly.

About nine hours after a tugboat captain reported the spill, the first oil-removing skimmer reached the scene, according to state and federal officials.

"The more I learn about it, the more I'm upset about the time that lapsed between the notice of the spill and getting the oil cleanup equipment on scene," said Kathy Fletcher, executive director of People for Puget Sound, an environmental organization.

This morning, a helicopter will be in the air surveying the spill of heavy-grade industrial oil. Specially trained crews will be helping rescue oiled marine birds and 10 skimmers will be back on the waters, state Department of Ecology spokesman Larry Altose said last night.

Investigators are focusing their search for the guilty party on several vessels headed north out of Tacoma toward Alaska, a U.S. Coast Guard investigator said. About a half-dozen vessels originally were scrutinized.

Late last night, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer learned that one of the ships in the area around the time of the spill has a lengthy record of involvement in oil-spill investigations.

The Horizon Tacoma, a 679-foot freighter, left Tacoma at 11 p.m. Wednesday headed for Anchorage, records from Marine Exchange of Puget Sound show.

"We have checked with the captain and the crew of the ship who have assured us they were not involved in any spill. And that's a fact," said Marv Buchanan, director of marketing for the Alaska division of Horizon Lines.

He said the captain checked the ship for leaks and other signs of spills and found none.

"We run these ships back and forth to Alaska. We have been doing it very safely for a long time," he said.

Coast Guard records show that the ship has been investigated seven times regarding possible oil discharges since it went into service in 1987.

Coast Guard Lt. Aaron Meadows-Hills said the agency cannot release the names of the vessels where samples will be taken because that is part of the investigation.

"I'm just really interested to find out how this happened," Vashon resident Melissa Burr said as she surveyed the damage at the ferry dock at the island's south end.

"I'm pretty awestruck that it's happened," she said. "I'm disgusted."

There was no way to predict where the slick might travel by morning, the Ecology Department's Altose said, but he noted that a "finger of sheen" was pointing last night toward Gig Harbor.

Officials defended the slow pace of the early containment efforts.

"The response was hampered by fog before and after sunrise," Altose said.

"I understand when it's dark it's really hard to do much of anything," Fletcher countered, "but when it starts to get light and people started reporting oil coming on shore ... they could have gotten equipment over on Vashon and Maury islands."


		Joshua Trujillo / P-I
	An oil slick gathers near the Tahlequah ferry yesterday on the south end of Vashon Island. The slick, reported early yesterday morning, coated the southern ends of Maury and Vashon islands.

Heavy fog and the fact that the spill wasn't reported by the ship that dumped it made the situation "unusually challenging," said Ron Holcomb, who was on the scene yesterday coordinating the ecology department's spill-response team.

When so-called "mystery spills" occur, the Coast Guard collects samples from the water and from all possible sources in the area -- most probably ships in this case. The samples are sent to a Coast Guard lab in Connecticut where tests are done that can match samples.

Though scientifically accurate, the tests aren't enough to make a case alone. For one thing, many ships in an area might be using the same heavy-grade bunker fuel. Other shoe-leather investigative techniques are needed, such as checking ships' logs and other records that might indicate who was in what area at what time.

Criminal penalties for dumping and leaving the fuel could be up to three times what the federal government pays to handle the mess. A 4,800-gallon oil spill at Point Wells near Edmonds on Dec. 30, 2003 -- the last major spill in the Sound -- wound up costing more than $1 million to clean up.

Yesterday's spill seeped quickly into Quartermaster Harbor -- a hook-shaped inlet curving between Maury and Vashon. The harbor has meadows of eelgrass where the largest herring population in southern Puget Sound will come in another two months to spawn. Small fish called surf smelt are already spawning there.

More than a thousand Western grebes have already arrived in the harbor where they'll fatten up over the winter before flying north to have babies.

The harbor is "one of the last holdouts for that bird," said Dan Willsie, a "master birder" with the Audubon Society. The local grebe population has declined more than 80 percent in the past couple of decades.

The spill coated the southern ends of Maury and Vashon islands, creeping a short way up the west and east sides of both.

Most of Maury's shorelines and surrounding waters are thought to be so important for marine life that they're being considered by the state for designation as a reserve area.

The "resources in this spot are the best of what Puget Sound has to offer," Fletcher said.

Having so much at stake environmentally added to the frustration of some.

"I know they didn't want to start skimming until they knew the extent of what they were dealing with," Fletcher said. "But on the other hand it was calm -- perfect skimming conditions."

Holcomb defended the decision to wait until the spill could be surveyed by the air.

"To be effective at skimming oil off the water, you have to be in the heavy oil and on the water it's almost impossible, very difficult to know if you're in the right area," he said. "Certainly it's better to have them (boats) out there than not at all."

The spill was discovered by a tugboat captain, Bill Sibbett, in the waters north of Tacoma's Commencement Bay in the wee hours of the morning.

"I just smelled this huge smell of oil and I thought, 'Oh God.' It was a solid pool of black oil," said Sibbett, 51.

Sibbett, an Indianola resident, radioed the Coast Guard about the spill at 1:15 a.m.


		Mike Urban / P-I
	Doug Mish uses an oar to fend off clumps of oil from his family's beach near the Tahlequah ferry dock at the south end of Vashon Island.

After several hours, Sibbett had picked up another barge in Tacoma and was headed back out to Blake Island. When he hit the waters at 6:40 a.m., he said, he was surprised to see no one had responded to his call.

"There were no cleanup boats, no survey boats, no nothing," Sibbett said. "Theoretically, they could have had someone out there by 3 or 4 in the morning."

By 8 a.m., a skimmer -- a boat rigged to filter oil from the water -- had been called but had no personnel nearby. The Tacoma Fire Department also attempted to send a boat out at 8:45, but turned back because of fog, Holcomb said. Not until 10 a.m. did the first skimmer begin the cleanup.

Between 11 a.m. and noon, response officials were able to survey the spill by helicopter. Another skimmer was sent out around noon.

Already the oil had reached local beaches, fouling rocks near the Tahlequah ferry terminal on Vashon Island. The spill lapped onto the southern shores of Maury Island. It then spread to Point Defiance in Tacoma.

By late yesterday, cleanup workers began placing booms in areas identified by the state as environmentally sensitive and that had not yet been touched by the oil.

It was too late for the beaches at Doug Mish's house.

By yesterday afternoon, he was fending oil-slicked balls of eelgrass off the beach behind his home at Vashon's south end, a property that has been in his family for three generations. The place is called Clam Cove.

"Once it gets inside the rock eddies, every little critter that lives in there -- at low tide, they're dead," Mish said. "They made a big mistake when they pulled the skimmers out of here."

The Point Wells spill last winter was caused by a series of slip-ups during the refilling of a fuel barge at Chevron's terminal.

That spill was not contained in part because it occurred at night, when it was impossible to see where the slick was going. The oil ended up swirling out into the Sound, fouling a marine shoreline rich with sealife, including shellfish beds, about five miles away on the Kitsap Peninsula on the western shore of the Sound.


		Mike Urban / P-I
	Oil blackens Manzanita Beach on the south end of Maury Island.

Criticisms of the Department of Ecology and the Coast Guard's response to yesterday's spill are made sharper by the fact that the Point Wells spill also got away from responders.

"How many times do we have to go through this scenario?" asked Fred Felleman, northwest director of Ocean Advocates, an environmental group. "If we can't do better than this, it's obvious we're not doing something right."

Tribal members will likely take a hit in this spill as well.

About 50 divers and their families rely on the geoduck beds along the east bank of Maury Island for their livelihood, said Henry John, who works in the shellfish department for the Puyallup Tribe.

A 5-mile track of beds has been closed since spring because of high toxin levels, but John said the tribe was hoping that they would be open soon. But yesterday morning, he got a call from a health official saying that there was a chance it would be closed for a while, he said.

"It sounds like it's out for now," he said, adding that he hoped they could find other places to harvest. The tribe has shellfish harvesting rights, and relies on the beds along Maury for about three-quarters of its 330,000-pound annual quota.

"It kind of didn't register at first," he said. "After a while, it started hitting me. I thought it was this little oil spill and then the Department of Health called. I said, 'Oh man, this is bigger than I thought it was.' "

The tribe would like to find out where the source is, said John Anderson, fisheries director for the Puyallup Tribe.

"You do have sheen on the water, which means a lot of it is sinking down to the sediments. You're concerned about the bottom-dwelling critters, that's part of the food chain," he said. The Dalco Passage area north of Tacoma is a feeding ground for octopus.

He said the coho salmon season is winding up, so he's more concerned about whether it would affect chum fishing; a preliminary report showed that a million chum were headed for South Sound.

It's really too early to know what the economic impact would be, he said.

"It's hard to tell because they don't yet know how big the spill is; it might be just a sheen on the water. We're waiting and hopefully they can find the source.

"If we knew more, we could react," he said.

Recreational shellfish harvest will be affected as well.

Yesterday, Mish lamented the loss suffered at his beach -- "one of the best clamming beaches on the island," he said. His hands were oiled and there was a spot of brown-black goo on the end of his nose.

"This is a natural gathering place, a natural back eddy," he said. "It's a pristine beach here, or was a pristine beach. I've caught sea-run trout and salmon here, dug tons of clams outta this place over the years."

"We love the island, and the irony of it is that the island is pretty environmental, and this is going to affect the wildlife," said Burr, a fellow island resident.

The environmental and economic damage remain unclear, but many hope the penalty to the culprit is severe.

"When whoever it is is caught, there should be no mercy," Fletcher said.

THREATENED BY THE SPILL

Environmentalists say the oil spill near Commencement Bay is threatening aquatic plants, seabirds and fish:

Western grebes -- These night-foraging birds prey on aquatic insects and small fish. Their numbers here have dropped significantly in the Puget Sound region, matching the decline of their favorite food -- herring.

Great blue heron -- This elegant bird feeds on small fish, breeds in colonies and nests in treetops. Populations around the sound are declining, a fact conservationists attribute to loss of protected nesting sites and wetlands.

Pacific herring -- Herring are important food sources for a wide variety of fish, mammals and birds. The single biggest stock in the Sound, at Cherry Point, has plummeted -- perhaps because of industrial activities in the area. Many other stocks in the region have increased.

Rockfish -- These bottom-dwelling fish, averaging 2 feet in length, live for decades. Because they reproduce infrequently, they are particularly vulnerable to overfishing. In some places, rockfish have disappeared.

Surf smelt -- Surf smelt occur throughout the marine waters of Washington, from the Columbia River to the Canadian border and southernmost Puget Sound. They are an abundant schooling forage fish living near shore.

Eelgrass -- A haven for juvenile fish and shellfish, eelgrass meadows are a vital part of the nearshore food web. Vulnerable to shoreline development and pollution, the Sound's meadows have shrunk by an estimated one-third.

P-I reporters Robert McClure and Phuong Cat Le contributed to this report. P-I reporter Lisa Stiffler can be reached at 206-448-8042 or lisastiffler@seattlepi.com

Add P-I Local headlines to