Navy Team Fails to Ignite Fuel Oil on Grounded Ship

Navy demolition experts with grenades failed to set fire to a grounded cargo ship Wednesday night, leaving it vulnerable to an advancing storm that threatened to break it apart and cause a disastrous oil spill near Oregon’s scenic Coos Bay.

Undertaking an operation that has never been attempted in the mainland United States, Coast Guard officials abandoned six days of efforts to refloat the ship and, in the face of mounting rain squalls and rising seas, began lobbing explosive grenades into the vessel in an attempt to burn off 400,000 gallons of fuel oil before it can seep onto nearby beaches.

Flames flickered and black smoke billowed out of the New Carissa, but within seconds the only thing burning aboard the ship was a small smoldering fire in one cargo hold.

Coast Guard officials had said that burning the ship could be like lighting a barbecue grill--it could take several tries to get the heavy, low-grade oil to burn. Chief Gene Maestas said there were no more attempts to ignite the oil Wednesday night because of the darkness.

The 639-foot ship is stranded at a sand spit just 150 yards off the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, one of the nation’s most important national recreation areas.

Leaking fuel oil already has streaked beaches along a five-mile stretch north and south of Coos Bay, threatening one of the West Coast’s most productive marine wildlife habitat areas and south-central Oregon’s $24-million-a-year Dungeness crab industry.

The impact on wildlife so far has been minimal from the small quantity of oil that has oozed from the ship since it began leaking Monday, four days after it ran aground. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife said two grebes had been spotted swimming in oil, and about 100 sanderlings were seen in the area, a few with oil on their bellies.

Coos Bay is the most biologically rich estuary in Oregon, officials said, and the impact of a major spill could be devastating. It is home to a small but key population of Western snowy plovers, listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act, that begin nesting in the area in mid-March.

The region also is home to a large number of shorebirds and waterfowl, in addition to seals, sea lions, river otters and several species of shellfish.

“Coos Bay is one of the most sensitive habitat estuaries in the state. It’s rich in biology, and we have unique intertidal headland there that would be extremely difficult to protect,” said Kyle Walker, head of information and education for the Fish and Wildlife Department.

A team from Berkeley’s International Bird Rescue Research Center was on hand, along with more than 200 volunteers who set up a mobile wildlife treatment center and began collecting oil-mottled sand along the beaches, hauling it away in plastic bags.

“Essentially, we’re kind of skating on the edge here, hoping, praying hard we’ll avoid a disaster,” Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) said after touring the scene by helicopter. “How it’s all going to work, we don’t know.”

The Panamanian-owned, Japanese-operated New Carissa cargo ship, inbound to pick up a load of wood chips from Roseburg, Ore., was anchored offshore awaiting a pilot ship escort into the narrow mouth of the bay when its anchor apparently failed, officials said. The ship engines appeared unable to compensate for high winds and heavy seas, although there is no final report on how the ship eventually grounded, rupturing three of five fuel bunkers containing about 140,000 gallons of the nearly 400,000 gallons of fuel oil and diesel on board.

Coast Guard officials initially called in a huge salvage ship to haul the vessel out to sea. But the game plan changed abruptly late Wednesday morning with forecasts for a major new winter storm in the region, expected to generate winds of up to 65 knots and seas as high as 24 feet.

“The unified command has made a decision, and that decision is what we call a controlled burn,” Coast Guard Capt. Mike Hall said. “We will be burning the remaining fuel aboard the vessel. This decision supports our priority to protect the environment.”

Coast Guard officials said they feared that the new storm could break apart the vessel and send its oil into the ocean at a time when high seas would make it virtually impossible to contain a widening spill.

Such a burn-off has been conducted before in Alaska and Europe, Chief Petty Officer Mike Fannin said. “As far as whether it’s going to get all of it [this time], I honestly don’t know,” he said.

Coast Guard officials called in an explosives team from the U.S. Naval Air Station at Whidby Island, Wash., who lobbed grenades, fueled by several five-gallon cans of gasoline, onto the deck of the ship from a position farther offshore. The fuel on board had been pumped up into the ship’s empty cargo hold, just below deck level.

“It’s about what I expected--a small flash, a little smoke and it went out,” said Bob Graham, a retired truck driver, part of a crowd of people who waited for hours on the bluffs to see the blaze.

Once the fire is started, it could take a couple of days to burn off the fuel.

The ship was not expected to be consumed in the fire because it is made of steel. It is unclear what would happen to what remains of it once the fuel oil is cleared.

Before attempting to light the fire, officials established a four-mile safety zone around the ship, along with airspace overflight restrictions ranging two miles away and 1,000 feet above the area. Nearby residents sensitive to smoke were advised to leave.

Nick Furman, director of the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission, said the majority of this year’s crab crop has been harvested. But a number of crab boats still have their gear in place in the area around the grounded ship and could risk damage from the salvage vessels in the vicinity.

Furman said the situation could mean potential damage to what was expected to be an unusually healthy crab crop next year.

The 400,000 gallons of fuel oil on board the New Carissa is the equivalent of about 53 tanker trucks of oil. The largest oil spill in U.S. history came with the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989, spilling 11.2 million gallons of oil.

Associated Press contributed to this story.