Salvage crews have finished transferring thousands of liters of diesel fuel from a stricken tugboat that crashed into the same reef that damaged the Exxon Valdez 20 years ago, a spokesman for the tug’s owner said on Saturday.
Crews finished transferring about 185,500 liters of fuel and water mixed from the two damaged tanks late on Friday, said Jim Butler, a spokesman for Crowley Maritime Services, the company that owns the stricken tug.
A towing vessel began bringing the tugboat back to the Port of Valdez about 2pm on Saturday after the US Coast Guard, state of Alaska and Crowley agreed on a tow plan, he said. The tug is being watched by some booming and skimming vessels and monitored by a helicopter to make sure there is no remaining fuel, Butler said.
Officials had hoped to remove the fuel from the tugboat’s tanks early on Friday before towing it back to Valdez, but diesel removal was halted after about 10 minutes when workers noticed a new sheen on the surface of the water, said Coast Guard Lieutenant Erin Christensen, a spokeswoman for the joint information center.
Helicopter flights measured the sheen at 15m wide by 1.6km long, Christensen said.
The 41m tug Pathfinder had just finished checking for dangerous ice and was heading back to port in Valdez when it hit Bligh Reef at 6:15pm on Wednesday.
The boat is part of the Ship Escort Response Vessel System that was created after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989 and spilled nearly 41 million liters of crude oil — the worst ever US spill.
Six fishing vessels plus Coast Guard cutters and salvage vehicles worked to skim the diesel off the surface of the water.
US Senator Mark Begich said it was troubling that a spill response vessel “managed to run aground on one of the most well-marked and well-known reefs in the Northern Hemisphere.”
It wasn’t yet known how much spilled. The Coast Guard said on Thursday that two of its tanks — containing an estimated 126,800 liters of diesel fuel — were damaged. But an estimate on how much fuel spilled won’t be completed until the tug reaches port and all materials used in cleaning up the spill can be examined to make a clear calculation, Butler said.
The SERVS system provides two escort tugboats for each tanker traveling through the sound after leaving the Valdez Marine Terminal with North Slope crude delivered through the trans-Alaska pipeline.
The grounding of the tug was very different from the Exxon Valdez accident in which an enormous amount of black crude oil spilled. The tug was carrying much lighter diesel fuel that will evaporate in time, Coast Guard Petty Officer Jon-Paul Rios said.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS