Hauling Crude in Rough Political Waters : Commerce: Oil tankers have trekked local coastline since spring. Safety comes first, Chevron says, but critics still fear for the environment.

Every time that Capt. John L. Dwyer puts to sea, he carries a burden of responsibility about as heavy as the 258,000 barrels of oil stored in his ship’s cargo tanks.

For the 41-year-old master of the Chevron oil tanker Louisiana, the task of moving crude down the Ventura County coast from a terminal northwest of Santa Barbara to Long Beach is a job with a narrow margin of error. He knows that a mistake could lead to an environmental disaster.

“We don’t obsess with it, but the one thing the (Exxon) Valdez accident made clear was how important not making mistakes is,” said Dwyer, the button-down opposite of the old salt who used to command large ships. “Safety is everything in our line of work.”

The Louisiana and another mammoth Chevron tanker began plying the 65-mile Santa Barbara Channel only a few months ago after the oil company prevailed in a 10-year legal war with government regulators and environmentalists.

Critics argued that the shipments--the first regularly scheduled for the Santa Barbara Channel in years--opened up the Ventura and Santa Barbara county coastlines to a cataclysmic spill.

“We are talking about exposing an area to unnecessary risk that is home to animals ranging from the largest creature in the seas, the blue whale, to plankton,” said Robert Sollen, spokesman for the Santa Barbara County Environmental Coalition.

Within the Santa Barbara Channel, which is known by mariners for its sometimes-fierce weather and sea conditions, is the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary.

That area encompasses San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, Anacapa and Santa Barbara islands, which attract six species of seals and sea lions, 27 species of whales and dolphins and 80 species of sea birds. It is also the center of a multimillion-dollar fishery and a tourism center.

Environmentalists fear that the teeming sanctuary and related industries could be destroyed with a single careless turn or mechanical failure of a tanker such as the Louisiana. Many locals vividly remember cleaning sea birds and shoveling black goo from beaches in 1969, after an oil platform off Santa Barbara blew out. And they note the destruction wrought on a pristine Alaskan sound after the 1989 grounding of the Exxon Valdez supertanker.

But Dwyer and his crew said that there have been no spills from Chevron’s two tankers since they began shipments from their Gaviota terminal though the channel to Los Angeles Basin terminals last spring.

“Those people aren’t nearly as close to the environment as I am,” said Joseph A. Gors, 31, the Louisiana’s second mate, of the environmentalist critics. “I kind of resent them painting me and others in the tank-ship business as uncaring monsters. I feel a real conservatorship for the ocean. It’s important to me personally that it remain clean and pollution-free.”

‘A Lot Different Today’

Aboard the Louisiana, visitors are often surprised by the ship’s size--nearly two football fields in length--and its cleanliness. Also striking are its brick-red deck and five-story “house”--a structure at the tanker’s rear where sleeping quarters, a dining hall, a lounge, the engine room and a bridge all are located.

Inside the house, off-duty crew members gobble meals freshly prepared by the ship’s steward, a former San Francisco chef, or watch one of hundreds of movies in the ship’s lounge on the wide-screen TV.

On deck, crew members walk the length of the ship, constantly inspecting the miles of pipes, hoses and gauges laid out from bow to stern. On the bridge, the eyes of two officers are glued to binoculars or radar screens.

Dwyer, in his well-appointed office below the bridge, often uses a free moment to process paperwork and answer electronic mail from Chevron offices in San Francisco and Long Beach.

On a recent evening, the Louisiana was moored in calm waters about a mile off Gaviota, beginning a one-day cycle of loading crude oil and churning at 13.5 knots toward Long Beach Harbor.

The ship was tied down by several buoys and two anchors the size of compact cars, when the crew began a 15-hour process of meticulously loading tens of thousands of barrels of Point Arguello crude into the ship’s 16 cavernous tanks.

The crew uses two 16-inch-diameter hoses hoisted off the shallow sea floor by a hydraulic crane. One hose delivers the oil and the other acts to recover vapors from the cargo holds. The loading process is carefully monitored from the ship’s loading center, a small room that resembles a control center in a nuclear power plant and is staffed around the clock.

After loading, a wall of air is forced back through the mile-long hoses to assure that no oil escapes. Crew members then carefully wipe the ends of the hoses with rags and begin bolting down two metal seals weighing hundreds of pounds each at the ends of the lines.

“It’s a lot different today than it was 10 or 15 years ago,” boatswain Kenneth Sharp said. “Back then, it was pretty sloppy. There would be oil flying all around as you tried to make the connection.”

Once they are free, a crane carefully lowers the hoses back into the ocean, where they are marked by buoys so ships can clearly see them.

Mark P. Michals, 38, the Louisiana’s chief mate, said the tanker comes under constant scrutiny of both regulators and environmentalists at Gaviota.

“Everything we do there is watched, inspected or examined,” he said.

The Louisiana eases southward in the Santa Barbara Channel, beginning a 10-hour journey to Long Beach Harbor. Dwyer and the bridge crew precisely navigate their way, avoiding other vessels and oil platforms that dot the channel.

Off the Ventura County coast, about three hours into the journey, the Louisiana passes within three miles of Anacapa Island’s craggy southern tip, the closest it comes to any of the Channel Islands.

As it plows through the channel, the vessel’s 651-foot length and 50,000-ton weight keep it from bouncing with the ocean’s swells, even at top speed. The ship’s four-foot wake serves as a playground for scores of dolphins tagging along.

The 17-year-old tanker is one of a new generation of double-hulled vessels designed to control the loss of oil after a low-speed collision or grounding. It is equipped with two radar systems and tracked by a third on land and is considered nimble, as oil tankers go.

“She is very maneuverable for her size,” Dwyer said. “But obviously, we can’t turn on a dime. That’s why we rely on our crew and our navigational equipment. We might have the right of way once in the lane, but we don’t usually exercise that right. We’ll go way out of our way to avoid getting even remotely close to another ship.”

Answering Critics

Arthur McKenzie, executive director of a New York-based consulting firm that rates the safety of the world’s tankers, said Chevron’s accident record is the best among oil fleets with at least 20 vessels.

“Chevron has always been very gung-ho in terms of safety. That’s not to say they haven’t had their share of accidents. They have,” McKenzie said. “But they are very careful about staffing and operations. They practice the rule that it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

Safety, of course, has been the chief concern among opponents of Chevron’s operations at Point Arguello, northwest of Santa Barbara. Critics argued that despite Chevron’s $2.6-billion investment there, shipments of crude oil should be made only through pipelines.

A permit allowing Chevron to ship 50,000 barrels a day--more than one trip a week by the Louisiana--was granted by the California Coastal Commission in January. The permit is good until Jan. 1, 1996.

But Chevron officials say they’ve filled only nine tankers at the Gaviota terminal this year and plan no more than one voyage a week at peak.

During its recent trip, the Louisiana reached Long Beach after a largely uneventful voyage--its only obstacles being distant encounters with a cargo ship and sport fishing boat that cut closely behind it.

“My approach is that if there’s a question or a doubt about some aspect of our operation, we don’t do it,” Dwyer said. “The secret of oil is that if you never see it, you know you’ll be OK.”

Times photographer Alan Hagman contributed to this story.