COLUMN ONE : Why Oil Spills Are Increasing : Five of the world’s biggest such disasters have occurred in the 1990s. The reason is a combination of unsafe tankers, untrained crews and unenforced regulations.

The oceans’ traffic cops operate a complex system of checks and double-checks to ensure the safety of the tankers that carry almost half of the world’s oil over the high seas. But you wouldn’t know it by watching the ships coming and going here in the world’s busiest port.

Just last month, a pilot from the Rotterdam port was shocked by what he found when he boarded a small, Greek-owned tanker to guide it to its dock. The crew took 10 minutes to respond to his orders and didn’t know where to look for basic shipboard equipment. Mostly Filipinos, they could scarcely understand their Greek captain.

There were no lifeboats. The main fire pump was missing; the emergency fire pump didn’t work. The emergency generator, which was supposed to kick in if the main engine failed, was out of commission.

“Everything that should have been there either wasn’t there or didn’t work,” said Gonard Scheres, the Rotterdam port inspector who combed over the ship after it docked.

This was no isolated case. Shell Oil says 20% of the world’s tankers do not meet international safety standards. BP Shipping, an arm of British Petroleum, flunked 299 of the 960 ships it inspected last year before entrusting them with BP cargo.

“Some are only marginal,” said Robert W. Shewan, BP Shipping’s top risk management official. “But some are terrible.”

The amazing thing about oil tankers is not that there are so many accidents, critics say. The amazing thing is that there are not more.

In fact, for a host of reasons--ranging from an aging tanker fleet to poorly trained crews--serious oil spills are on the upswing. After tailing off sharply for most of the 1980s, they started rising again with the Exxon Valdez disaster off the coast of Alaska in 1989. That spill, because it fouled a largely enclosed body of water that was rich with wildlife, was the costliest ever to clean up--more than $2 billion so far, with several lawsuits still unsettled.

Five of the world’s 15 biggest oil spills have occurred in the 1990s, the latest two occurring in rapid succession off the Spanish coast in December and Scotland’s Shetland Islands in January.

About 3,250 transoceanic tankers carry the world’s oil. On a typical day, some 4.6 million tons of oil is afloat on the oceans; nearly half of the oil the world uses has been transported by tanker.

Among the tanker fleet are the world’s biggest moving man-made objects. The biggest of all, the Japanese-built Jahre Viking, is about four football fields long and nearly a football field wide. It has a capacity of more than 600,000 tons of oil, so its cargo could fill 15,584 tank trucks of 38.5 tons each--a line of trucks 200 miles long.

Supervising all this is a tangled web of governmental and private organizations. The International Maritime Organization, a London-based U.N. agency, sets global tanker standards but has no way to punish noncompliance. Every tanker and crew must be certified as seaworthy by the country whose flag it flies.

Private “classification societies” certify the structural integrity of each ship’s hull and essential machinery. Oil companies often inspect tankers before they lease them. Like Rotterdam’s, many ports inspect the tankers that dock at them. But their only weapon is to detain ships until owners promise to make the necessary corrections--a promise they may forget as soon as their ships leave port.

Even that doesn’t always do the job. “There’s a lot of inspections going on, but no tremendous enforcement,” said Arthur McKenzie of the Tanker Advisory Center in New York. “Our industry still to a great extent is self-regulated.”

The United States took matters into its own hands in 1990 when Congress, the wreck of the Exxon Valdez still fresh in its memory, passed the Oil Pollution Act. The law, the world’s toughest, requires double hulls as of next year on all new tankers that call at American ports and greatly increases the liability faced by oil companies and tanker owners for tanker accidents off U.S. shores.

The 12-nation European Community is considering similar legislation. The EC’s executive commission, which proposed action, complained of “inadequate implementation and insufficient enforcement of the international standards that do exist.”

Even the strictest regulation would not prevent all accidents. Shipping experts attribute some 80% of accidents to human error, not poor equipment. BP Shipping officials estimate that half of all accidents involve ships that they would have approved.

And for every accident, there are many near-misses.

During the four years since the Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound, the U.S. Coast Guard has identified nine potential calamities in those same waters. The closest call came last October, when the tanker Kenai had problems with its steering system and was within 100 yards of piling up on a rock when an escort tug pushed it to safety.

For all that, the tanker business has become much safer than it was in the 1970s, with the number of major spills (more than 770 tons) slipping from 24 per year in the 1970s to 10 per year so far in this decade. The International Tanker Owners Assn., based in Oslo, insists that shipping is “an environmentally friendly means of transport.” It said that “99.95% of the oil transported arrives safely at its destination.”

The trouble is that the remaining 0.05% is still a lot of oil. In the first three years of this decade, according to the London-based International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation, tankers disgorged a staggering 715,000 tons of oil into the oceans. That’s enough to make 43 million gallons of gasoline--just about enough to fuel every car in California for a day.

Much of that oil was spilled far from land and evaporated or was eaten by naturally occurring microbes before it could do much damage. But a very visible fraction of it washed onto beaches, killing wildlife and despoiling scenic shores.

Underlying the tanker industry’s safety problems is a financial crunch that has squeezed the industry ever since the first Arab oil embargo 20 years ago. Before the embargo, BP’s Shewan said, a new tanker could pay for itself in just its first three months of operation. That spawned a tremendous building boom in tankers. About one-third of the tankers in service today went to sea from 1973 to 1977.

The 1973 Arab oil embargo choked off much of the supply of tanker-delivered oil and made the business suddenly unprofitable. With the oversupply of tankers, business has never recovered.

The financial crunch has forced many tanker owners--a diverse lot, ranging from the major oil companies themselves to some of the legendary Greek shipping magnates to many small-time operators of just a single ship--to cut corners. “Maintenance and manning budgets came under severe and continuous pressure,” Shell Oil recently reported.

Old tankers are not necessarily dangerous ones. But they may be, if they have not been maintained properly. Half the world’s tanker fleet is more than 15 years old, according to the EC commission, and these tankers are responsible for about two-thirds of all accidents.

About half of the world’s new tankers are made in Japan and South Korea. In Japan, which relies on tankers to deliver virtually all its oil, shipyards pay strict attention to safety; Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has developed a system of computers and satellites to help ships avoid collisions and storms.

Masaru Kai, a managing director at Nippon Oil, Japan’s largest oil distributor, blames poorly trained crews for most accidents. On international voyages, most tanker seamen are from the Third World; owners cannot afford the wages of sailors from the industrial countries. The crews on the two Japan-bound tankers that collided earlier this year in the ship-clogged Strait of Malacca were both from developing countries.

The United Nations’ International Maritime Organization has set voluntary standards for crew training. But Shell Oil, for one, said it could find no evidence that they had had any effect.

The Philippines has become the world’s largest supplier of seamen, with an estimated 130,000 Filipinos aboard ships of all kinds at any one time and 70,000 others awaiting berths. Some 50 colleges, from the highly regarded Philippine Merchant Marine Academy to a series of diploma mills, turn out about 10,000 graduates a year.

Until recently, license exams were often sold or otherwise compromised, but standards have improved substantially since computerized testing was introduced for officers last year.

“There used to be an 80% passing rate,” said Reiner Blum, a German captain who runs one of the Philippines’ 150 or so manpower supply agencies. “That’s now about 30%.”

Gil Fernandez, commodore of the government-run Philippine Merchant Marine Academy, said Filipino sailors are prized because they usually speak some English and will accept much lower pay--about $300 a month for a starting seaman--than Europeans or Americans. (An able-bodied American seaman grosses about $3,000 a month, with overtime included.)

Sometimes the officers are also suspect.

“When you get on an airplane, you don’t wonder if the pilot knows how to fly,” said Andrew Lockie, who is in charge of BP Shipping’s tanker inspection program. “But you can get on a ship and worry whether the junior officers, if not the captain, can steer it.”

Last year, BP found what it considered a particularly incompetent crew on a Yugoslav-built tanker, then docked in Amsterdam, that it was considering leasing.

The chief engineer and second engineer lacked the internationally accepted qualifications for their jobs. Despite an explosive cargo of gasoline, crew members smoked throughout the ship, not just in the two permitted areas. They wore neither protective boots nor hard hats. Their chart of the Amsterdam port was 20 years out of date. Their firefighting instructions were in Serbo-Croatian--unreadable to the Greek crew.

That tanker was flying the flag of the Mediterranean island of Malta, one of a number of tiny nations that have turned ship registration into a profitable business by offering shipowners relatively low registration fees in return for lax regulation.

Many of the world’s tankers now fly these “flags of convenience.” After Japan, the most common flags on today’s tankers are from Panama, Liberia and Greece. “In some countries, it costs a bottle of whiskey to get your certificate,” an EC official said.

Shell, in its report on the tanker industry, expressed its fear that “80% of world shipping is administered under (governments) whose priority is to make money from shipping and shipping services, while making only a token investment in safety.”

Many flag states contract out the job of certifying tanker soundness to one of the world’s 49 private classification societies, some of which take their job more seriously than others.

For the most part, the 11 members of the International Assn. of Classification Societies, including the American Bureau of Shipping, rigorously inspect ships they certify. The biggest of them is Lloyd’s Register, which has 255 offices worldwide and carefully monitors the construction of about one-quarter of the world’s ships.

Tougher International Maritime Organization inspection standards are scheduled to take effect in 1995, but Yoshinori Oka, an official of the Japanese classification society, said it has decided to put them into effect this July.

The other 38 classification societies are not necessarily so painstaking. “During the shipbuilding slump of the 1980s,” Shell reported, “yards had to minimize costs to attract orders, and in consequence some classification societies reduced . . . requirements to win classification work and stay in business.”

No wonder the world’s major ports have found it prudent to undertake their own tanker inspections. Rotterdam’s six inspectors check about one-quarter of the ships that call on this port every year. They find that 80% to 85% of the vessels have at least minor defects that require correction. Of 433 tankers they inspected last year, 59 had sufficiently serious problems that they had to be detained.

“If the flag states would do their job, we’d be out of business,” said Willem Janssen, the port’s deputy inspector.

Shell found that only in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia were port inspectors tough enough to scare “unscrupulous” shipowners.

Not all experts are convinced that double hulls are the right way to go. BP Shipping, for example, supports them, but Shewan regards them as analogous to automobile bumpers: They prevent spills in gentle accidents but not when a tanker crashes into a rocky shore or runs into another ship at full speed.

The Oil Pollution Act also multiplied eightfold the liability faced by oil companies and tanker owners for tanker accidents. The law allows states to set even stiffer liability levels, and California enacted unlimited liability.

This provision could backfire, some experts warn, by scaring away some of the world’s richer, more scrupulous tanker owners, leaving the American market to smaller owners who have less to lose.

The law stiffens tanker crew standards, including drug and alcohol testing and review of applicants’ licenses. It makes the government, not the tanker or oil company, responsible for the immediate response to oil spills. To pay for cleanups, the law creates a $1-billion trust fund financed by a 5-cent-a-barrel tax on crude oil.

The Coast Guard, which is responsible for implementing the act, has come in for heavy criticism from environmental groups for moving too slowly.

“Three and a half years after the Exxon Valdez spill,” the Natural Resources Defense Council reported last December, “key prevention and response measures have not been implemented. . . . As a result, the public still faces serious risks of oil spills.”

Times staff writers Michael Parrish in Los Angeles, Bob Drogin in Manila, Leslie Helm in Tokyo and Sam Jameson in Seoul contributed to this report.

Three Decades of Oil Spills

Here’s a look at major oil spills and the size and source of the world’s tanker fleet:

1970s 1980s 1990s Number of major oil spills per year 24 9 10 Amount of oil spilled per year 343 131 238

(in thousands of tons. Figures for the number os spills include only spills of more than 770 tons. The amount of oil includes only spills of at least 7.7 tons)

AGE OF THE WORLD’S TANKER FLEET

Number Percentage 0-4 years 1,012 15 5-9 1,040 15 10-14 1,396 20 15-19 1,551 23 20-24 878 13 25-29 444 6 30+ 512 7

(as of mid-1992. Percentages do not add up because of rounding.)

WHERE THEY ARE REGISTERED Japan: 1,072 Panama*: 507 Liberia*: 441 Greece*: 291 Singapore: 273 China: 245 Russia: 240 United States: 207 Indonesia: 183 Italy: 180 Bahamas*: 178 Norway: 163 Malta*: 131 Great Britain: 114 Cyprus*: 103 * denotes “flags of convenience,” where registration standards are generally regarded as weak

WHERE THEY ARE BUILT

Under construction On order Japan 74 67 Italy 20 8 South Korea 19 27 Brazil 14 3 China 11 10 United States 0 0

Source: International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation, Lloyd’s Register