Risk of Tanker Breaking Up in Gulf Increases

Waves began breaking over the stern of the burning supertanker Mega Borg on Monday, increasing the risk that the ship, carrying 38 million gallons of light crude oil, might break up and sink in the Gulf of Mexico.

An estimated 100,000 gallons of crude already lost from the tanker formed an oil slick three miles long and 200 feet wide surrounded by a lighter sheen 10 miles long and 600 feet wide, the Coast Guard said.

Alarmed environmentalists were contemplating how to protect birds and other wildlife as the oil slick spread.

At the same time, tanker salvagers were stymied on two fronts. Special firefighting equipment from Holland did not arrive on time and flames leaping ever higher on the water’s surface made it impossible to spray the stern with fire-retardant foam.

“It is not a good sign,” Petty Officer Mark Sedwick, a Coast Guard spokesman in Galveston, said of the latest bad news about the Mega Borg. The tanker was carrying three times more oil than the Exxon Valdez held when it ran aground off Alaska in March, 1989, and caused the nation’s worst oil spill. The Mega Borg was 57 miles offshore in 130 feet of water.

Firefighters were standing by with 50 tons of chemical foam, which they said could be used effectively only after the scope of the fire is reduced.

The drama of saving the Mega Borg from sinking began Saturday, after an explosion rocked the tanker in the early morning as it was transferring oil to a smaller vessel bound for the port of Houston. Two Mega Borg crewmen were killed and two others are missing and presumed dead. The cause of the explosion is undetermined.

Since then, round-the-clock effort has been required to keep the tanker afloat and intact. As the days have worn on, firefighters have been unable to gain a toehold and, in fact, have lost ground in the race to avert environmental disaster.

On Sunday afternoon, the salvage operation was dealt a major blow when five explosions rocked the stern of the ship, already racked by fire for 24 hours. Since then, the news has been mostly bad. The secondary explosions caused at least one cargo tank to spring a leak and send burning oil off the stern and into the water. After the later explosions, the tanker started to list.

By Sunday night, the Coast Guard--which was overseeing but not participating in the firefighting--said that a final effort to douse the flames could be expected to begin early Monday. But that time came and went because the fire-fighting equipment ordered from Rotterdam had not yet arrived.

Coast Guard officials said that very little of the kind of equipment needed to fight such a fire was available in the United States because most oil ship fires take place in the North Sea and Persian Gulf.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. William Merlin defended the time taken to assemble the firefighting equipment from around the world.

“It is a very specialized business requiring very specialized equipment,” he said.

At a news conference Monday morning, Coast Guard Capt. Tom Greene said there was still three feet of freeboard at the stern and that the tanker had not sunk substantially overnight.

That changed, though, as the stern gradually dropped lower in the water, at least partly due to the weight of the water being sprayed on it by fireboats. An effort to begin foaming was halted when a new fire broke out on the port side of the ship. Those flames were quickly beaten back, but the scenario was changing once again.

Because the stern was lower in the water, Sedwick said, more oil was rolling out of the ship.

“(Sinking) has increased the amount of oil leaving the vessel,” he said. “You’ve got higher flames because it is fueling the fire.”

Sedwick said the spreading fire further forced crews to delay applying the foam.

As the dangerous waiting game went on, fireboats continued to douse the tanker to cool its superstructure and knock back the flames as much as possible.

Smit America, the salvage operator hired by the tanker’s Norwegian owners, has said it expected to have the fires under control about an hour after the foaming began. The company also said it would not begin that work until conditions were right and that that would not be before this morning.

While the Mega Borg was carrying three times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez, its cargo was a different variety. The oil on the Mega Borg was light crude, which disperses much faster by evaporation. Capt. Greene said Monday that the oil already spewed from the tanker probably would not reach Texas beaches because of the prevailing currents in the Gulf. He also said that light crude oil is considerably more toxic than the heavier oil carried by the Exxon Valdez.

Environmentalists worried about what might happen in the worst-case situation--if the tanker should sink and lose all its cargo.

The spill would come at the peak nesting season for thousands of gulls and terns along the Texas coast. A spokesman for the Sierra Club said efforts were already under way to mobilize volunteers should an oil slick affect shore birds’ habitats.

“We’re more concerned with the direct toxic effects with fish and shellfish,” said David Sager of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “And we always have concern for the sea turtles.”

Adm. Merlin said that the salvagers hoped to extinguish the fire and then stabilize the tanker in the water. He said that could be accomplished fairly quickly by shifting water sprayed into the pump room to a forward compartment in the ship.

Then, he said, the oil remaining in the Mega Borg could be transferred to other tankers brought alongside--the process that was in progress when the first explosion occurred.

Before that can be done, the fire would have to be extinguished. To do so will require that firefighters first spray foam from boats, then board the tanker and battle the flames from room to room.

“The first priority is to gain control and put out the fire,” Merlin said.