Tanker Sailors Say They’re Being Pushed to Limits of Safety by Reductions in Crews

ARCO Juneau was tied up at Berth 5 of the Alyeska Marine Terminal, hungrily suckling nearly 3.5 million gallons of North Slope crude each hour from the Trans Alaska pipeline.

It was dusk in the land of the midnight sun, and Capt. Greg Knowlton, 37, was ready for bed after a 17-hour watch. Tomorrow would be another long day as his 883-foot tanker left Valdez through Prince William Sound to bring its 350-million-gallon cargo to refineries near Seattle.

Once at sea, however, Knowlton’s job would settle into routine and tedium. His crew, meanwhile, would maintain an active pace filled with the many hours of overtime required by the pressure to run merchant vessels more efficiently--that is, with fewer crew members.

“There are very few people down there to keep things running,” Knowlton said during a busy 18-hour stop in Valdez.

Ship Life Changing

Automation and economics are changing life aboard the nation’s tankers. Officers have less to do with running ships and more to do with keeping books, and crews are smaller in number, harder at work and richer in pay.

No one has attributed the massive Alaska oil disaster to working conditions aboard the tanker Exxon Valdez, which ran aground in March and spilled 240,000 barrels of oil into ecologically sensitive Prince William Sound. The National Transportation Safety Board and Coast Guard have called hearings in Anchorage next month to investigate the accident.

But reports of alcohol abuse by the Exxon Valdez’ captain and confusion and inattention on the part of people on the ship’s bridge underscore the increasingly difficult conditions faced by the men and women who sail the iceberg-dotted waters of Alaska to bring one-fourth of the nation’s oil to market.

Many who make the Alaska run say that, even though riding atop thousands of tons of potentially fiery cargo keeps most people safety-conscious, it is tough to fight the ennui, exhaustion and loneliness produced by alternating fits of hard work and tedium aboard isolated ships making routine voyages.

‘Tremendous Stress’

“You’re running across a real fatigue factor with these people. They’re building up tremendous frustration and tremendous stress,” said one marine consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area with 48 years of experience at sea. “Some seek release in a bottle and some seek it other ways.”

The consultant, who asked not be named to avoid linking his opinions to his clients, said the problem often is manifested as mental fatigue among officers and physical exhaustion among the unlicensed crew. Unless they actively resist such general weariness, he warned, it can contribute to a “dangerous sense of complacency” at sea.

“There is no spirit aboard anymore, no camaraderie, no ‘sense of ship,’ ” he said. “Sailing is, in many ways, just a robotic thing--pushing buttons as an officer; chipping and painting on deck . . . . Especially (on the Alaska run) when you are in and out (of port), in and out, really boring. That’s why I got out.”

Knowlton, the ARCO Juneau’s skipper, said that for every day in which his intelligence, experience and skills are tested by rough seas or some other transient crisis, there are many more days with little to do.

Checks Crew, Keeps Records

A computer steers the ship; licensed mates oversee that computer, and seamen keep watch for other vessels. Knowlton, like other modern captains, is left to check on the crew and keep records that let the company compare his efficiency to that of other captains in ARCO’s fleet.

Knowlton said he is most busy entering and leaving port, and during brutish winter weather in the unpredictable Gulf of Alaska. The rest of the time--that is, most of the time--he is simply on call.

To fill his free time, Knowlton fiddles with his personal computer, studies nautical charts to prepare for a pilot’s certification exam and plans one day to teach himself Spanish.

“I try to keep my mind active because I have seen people who did not keep active and they got strange,” Knowlton said. “They would atrophy all around--mind and body.”

At the same time, however, tanker crew members say they are being pushed to the limits of safety by reductions in crew sizes--a major industry operating cost.

Crew Cutbacks on Tankers

In the last decade, tankers have routinely experienced crew cuts of a third or more. The 3-year-old Exxon Valdez, for example, was built for a crew of 33, but only 19 were on board when it ran into Bligh Reef with an unqualified mate at the helm and the captain in his cabin doing paper work and enjoying a bottle of low-alcohol Moussy beer.

(Tests performed 10 hours after the accident found that the captain, Joseph Hazelwood, had excessive levels of alcohol in his blood and urine.)

Federal laws require shipping companies in the Alaskan oil trade to use American-flag tankers with American crews.

Lloyds, the authoritative British shipping and insurance brokerage, figures that the payroll cost for a typical 26-member U.S. tanker crew is $3 million a year. A comparable 23-person British crew costs $1.03 million, whereas 21 Greek sailors could be hired for $475,000 and 28 Chinese seamen for $250,000.

$90,000 Salary Reported

Hazelwood, before he was fired, reportedly earned $90,000 for commanding Exxon tankers six months of each year. John Ballentine, a boatswain on another company’s tanker, Overseas Juneau, said that with overtime he earns $60,000 annually.

For this reason, captains are expected to watch their spreadsheets as well as their nautical charts.

In a speech last year, Frank Iarossi, president of Exxon Shipping Co., told industry executives that today’s tanker captains also must be managers trained in “effective supervision, performance standards, appraisals and counseling, industrial hygiene, EEO (equal employment opportunity) awareness, expense forecasting and monitoring, business practices and safety supervision.”

Iarossi has been credited with helping Exxon reduce its operating costs significantly. He also is coming under scrutiny, not only because of the spill in Alaska, but also because of an Exxon spill and near-disaster last month off Oahu in Hawaii and a more recent Exxon tanker grounding on the Mississippi River.

Such events have prompted seafaring unions to accuse Exxon, among others, of stressing budget-cutting management skills above experience and seamanship. In particular, they point to the practice of regularly comparing operating costs of comparable ships and pressuring all captains to match the lowest total in each category.

“They keep playing ship against ship,” said Don Dishinger of the 300-member Radio-Electronics Officers Union, which is fighting industry efforts to do away with the lone radio operator on ships running to Alaska. “If they find one ship where, say, the steward’s department cut costs 20% or something, they tell everyone: ‘Look here, do it this way.’ ”

Savings Over Safety Denied

Knowlton and other captains acknowledge some pressure to run their ships as efficiently as they could but denied that they felt pressure to tip the balance in favor of savings over safety.

“We all try to run the ship as efficiently as possible,” Knowlton said. “It’s not cutthroat competition. We’re not throwing knives at each other or anything, but we do try to keep costs down.”

Jack Miner, a retired tanker captain from Oakland, said every captain knows that he can be replaced--or his ship simply sold for scrap--if the owner is not making money.

“Everything has to go just right to show a profit or you can start losing money in a hurry,” he said. “Of course, you still have to worry about safety in any case. It’s up to the captain to balance the two.”

The shipping companies, he said, only “talk about safety as a fairly top priority until it comes down to a question of real money.”

No one has to remind ship captains or crew members of their expendability. The number of U.S. seamen has declined from 86,000 in 1951 to 10,657 in 1987, according to the Marine Index Bureau, an independent statistical service for the maritime industry. The number of seamen dropped 49% between 1977 and 1987 alone--the last 10 years for which figures are available.

‘Worried About Their Jobs’

“There are guys out there who are really worried about their jobs, and the companies are not letting them off the hook,” the Bay Area consultant said.

The pressure is not only to shave the margins of safety a bit thinner, but also to push oneself to work longer and harder regardless of fatigue.

In addition to doing two four-hour watches every day--on a twice-a-day schedule of four hours at work and eight hours at rest-- American crew members said it is not unusual for them to work four or six hours of overtime to compensate for smaller crews.

“The work’s still there, but there are fewer people to do it,” Ballentine said.

Shipping companies are aware of the difficulties of life at sea and attempt to compensate for it. ARCO, for example, is credited with being a particularly enlightened company in this regard, and recently added a gymnasium to the ARCO Juneau to supplement videotape players and other leisure equipment on board.

Ironically, room for the gymnasium was carved out by combining the space of two crew members’ quarters no longer needed because of staff cutbacks.

650 Titles in Video Locker

During a recent call in Valdez, a crew member of the ARCO Juneau was dispatched to town to rent several movies that were copied and added to the video locker, now filled with more than 650 titles. But crew members from other Alaska-bound ships said they have little time for watching movies or lifting weights.

“On a tanker, the VCR will hardly get used,” Ballentine said. “People are usually so tired that you clean yourself off and hit the rack (bed) right away. You’re so tired you dream about sleep.”

Dishinger, a radioman who sailed to Alaska on a tanker before switching to a container ship that shuttles across the Pacific, said the workload on those ships results in loneliness as well as exhaustion.

“It’s not good for morale,” he said. “When you have that few people, you never see anybody else on board. Everybody is so tired when they get off their watches that they just hit the rack. Go into one of the lounges, and you don’t see anybody.”

In spite of questions generated by the Exxon Valdez disaster, crew members of other ships and federal officials alike discount alcohol as a major problem on tankers in the Alaska trade. Crew members concede that some of their colleagues have brought alcohol on board some ships, despite an industry ban and dockside inspections. But they say drinkers are not tolerated for long because of the real and immediate danger they pose to their co-workers--and themselves.

The Marine Index Bureau, for example, reports that only four cases of alcoholism were reported among the 10,657 deep-sea merchant marine jobs filled in 1987. That is down from 23 reported in 1982--a sum equivalent to a rate of 13 cases per every 10,000 members of the larger work force employed at the time.

It is not clear how much that sharp decline in reported cases is affected by the harsher stigma and reduced tolerance shown to excessive drinkers.

In any case, ships abound with chilling tales of sailors enjoying “one too many.”

One heavy-drinking American sailor, for example, awoke one night believing that he heard his wife calling from an imaginary boat alongside. He broke away from shipmates and jumped over the railing to his death.

Other examples are less tragic, although equally disconcerting. ARCO Juneau crew members once told of a shipmate years ago who drove into a snowbank while returning to the ship from a Valdez bar. Helped by a charitable state trooper, the still-inebriated sailor got back on the road and rushed to the terminal in time to race down the gangway--and onto the wrong ship. Nevertheless, his own tanker waited for his return, and for good reason. He was the ship’s cook, and good food is crucial to morale.

Despite such tales, crew members and Coast Guard officials alike said fatigue and overreliance on technology are bigger problems than alcohol.

The run to Valdez is a preferred posting for many crew members because it requires relatively brief tours between ports. A cruise from Alaska to Long Beach, for example, can take as little as five days under perfect weather and traffic conditions.

But it can be as wearing as many longer voyages if the weather turns bad. Ships on the Valdez route have encountered storms with winds in excess of 80 m.p.h. and seas towering over 60 feet.

The Gulf of Alaska is considered one of the fiercest bodies of water in the world. During the winter, especially, it is a spawning ground for storms. The sea churns as one storm runs up the back of another, creating a tumultuous meteorologic sequence in which the residual swells from a passing storm remain even as the choppy seas caused by a new weather front arrive. Tanker crewmen often have to strap themselves into their bunks.