Alaskan Pipeline Poses Special Kind of Security Risk

This was what Chief Radarman Bob Bennett knew on the morning of Sept. 11 as he sat in the U.S. Coast Guard’s control center at the Valdez oil terminal, where a fifth of the U.S. domestic oil production gets loaded onto tankers every day.

He knew two airliners had struck the World Trade Center, another had hit the Pentagon, a fourth had crashed in Pennsylvania and a fifth--a Korean Airlines jet with 200 passengers aboard--was out of radio contact in the northern Pacific and headed for Alaskan airspace, signaling the universal “7500” radio transponder code for a hijacking.

He knew the U.S. military had scrambled F-15 fighter jets to intercept it, and he knew the military thought the Korean airliner could be headed for the Valdez oil terminal. He knew there were nearly 5 million gallons of oil in the terminal’s massive storage tanks. Three tankers were hitched to the berths at Valdez, their bellies taking on crude oil at the rate of 100,000 barrels an hour.

The order came through from the Coast Guard command: Get the tankers out of there. Evacuate the harbor. Shut down the terminal.

“At first, it was utter disbelief. And then we just kicked into gear,” said Bennett. “We ordered all the tankers to get underway immediately.”

One shipping company couldn’t find a pilot for the massive vessel. “I told ‘em to get tugs on the boat, pull it out of port and sit in the middle of the harbor, whatever, move it,” said Bennett.

The airliner, whose hijack signal had apparently been a mistake, landed without incident in Whitehorse. Federal authorities have not yet determined why the pilot had activated the hijack signal.

But three weeks later, the threat became real. On Oct. 4, someone took a .338-caliber rifle and fired a hole in the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Though it allegedly was a drunk, not a terrorist, the incident caused the second-largest oil spill in the history of the 23-year-old pipeline, leaving workers trying to clean up 285,600 gallons of oil spread across more than two acres of remote tundra forest in north-central Alaska.

More important, it underscored the vulnerability of the massive, 800-mile-long pipeline that is a crucial physical link in America’s domestic oil network.

How, Bennett and his colleagues wonder, do you stop someone from driving a bomb-laden boat into an oil tanker in the middle of a body of water the size of Vermont, triggering another Exxon Valdez-like oil spill? How do you protect 800 miles of steel pipeline, about half of it running aboveground on open public land, across three mountain ranges, through some of the most remote territory on Earth?

Just when the Coast Guard brought in ocean patrols and imposed a restricted zone to keep boats away from the Valdez oil terminal, a new and very unsettling riddle emerged, this time from the sky: Very late on the night of Sept. 26, a helicopter flew over the restricted zone within about two miles of the oil terminal and hovered there for about half an hour before vanishing as mysteriously as it had come.

Coast Guard officials and police contacted all known flight services in the area. “We took it pretty seriously,” said Coast Guard Lt. Keith Ropella, chief of vessel traffic at the Valdez terminal. “We accounted for all commercial aircraft and it wasn’t any of them, and it wasn’t a military aircraft. We were unable to identify it.”

Could it have been terrorists on a surveillance mission? “I guess you could say we don’t know with 100% certainty it wasn’t,” Ropella said, “but all I can say is, after our investigation, we don’t think it was a threat.”

Officials at Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., a joint venture of several oil companies that owns and operates the pipeline, say increased security measures put in place since the Sept. 11 attacks helped catch the man accused of firing at the pipeline Oct. 4 and limited the subsequent spill.

A helicopter patrol of the pipeline, beefed up last month from once a week to once a day, spotted two men on all-terrain vehicles about 50 miles north of Fairbanks on the access road and decided to land, said Alyeska spokesman Tim Woolston. One of the men fled, Woolston said, and the other man told the helicopter crew: “My brother just blew a hole in the pipeline.”

The crew took off, climbed over a nearby ridge and spotted the rupture, spewing oil 75 feet into the air. They radioed to Pump Station 7, about 15 miles away, which closed valves on each side of the hole, isolating an 11-mile section that continued to leak until Sunday, when workers clamped it. The entire North Slope oil field was virtually shut down for three days, but supplies to West Coast refineries continued uninterrupted because the Valdez terminal had about four days worth of oil stored in its tanks, authorities said.

Police arrested Daniel Carson Lewis, 37, charging him with assault, weapons misconduct and criminal mischief. Authorities said Lewis had a history of minor brushes with the law and was not considered a terrorist. Indeed, Woolston said, the pipeline is nicked with bullet marks from at least 50 previous shootings, but Lewis’ high-powered weapon was the first that succeeded in piercing the 48-inch-wide, double-steel-walled pipeline.

“We have a substantial security presence on the pipeline to protect it, but you have to understand that it’s an 800-mile pipeline that winds through some extremely remote areas of Alaska, and there are a small percentage of people out there who for whatever reason have a motive to do something to harm the pipeline, and if someone is motivated enough, it’s going to be very difficult to stop them,” Woolston said.

Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters in Washington that a variety of options, including electronic fencing and satellite surveillance, is being reviewed. State authorities are also considering closing down the Dalton Highway, the gravel road that runs between Fairbanks and the North Slope alongside the pipeline route.

In Valdez, the Coast Guard has brought in a 110-foot cutter to patrol the harbor, a small-boat detachment for additional patrols and added crews to augment Coast Guard cutters elsewhere in Prince William Sound.

The no-boat security zone extends a mile east, a mile north and two miles west of the giant loading terminal that stands on the other side of the water from the town of Valdez. After the helicopter incident, the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a no-fly zone within five miles of the oil terminal between sunset and sunrise.

Boaters who enter the restricted area get a warning letter the first time; they face seizure of their boat and criminal sanctions for repeat violations. Several warning letters have been issued already, Ropella said.

“But if somebody is determined to attack an asset, they probably will find a way,” he said.

At Alyeska’s control center in Valdez, Richard Ranger said company officials on Sept. 11 were able to immediately set up a command center to shut down the terminal and get tankers out of port when the Korean Airlines incident was unfolding.

“We were informed at 9 or 10 a.m. The word was that this KAL jet was inbound, its intentions weren’t known, at the moment it was not responding to FAA instructions to go to Canada, and they asked us to look at evacuating the terminal.”

Nonessential staff were moved out of the terminal, and those left began shutting down the massive facility, Ranger said. For the three tankers loading up oil at the berths--Arco Phillips’ Polar Texas and Polar Trader and the Exxon-contracted Benecia--hoses were disconnected and lines cast off, and the ships were underway by 10 a.m.

“Everybody is doing this, mind you, with the full knowledge that three jetliners have crashed into U.S. targets, a fourth has gone down, we have a plane coming in from Korea under jet escort and we don’t know what’s coming next,” Ranger said.

Within 20 minutes, the Korean airliner landed in Canada, but by then all tankers in the area were steaming out for the Gulf of Alaska. Then Alyeska officials were faced with the next troubling question: Should they keep the terminal closed, an option that would require the entire North Slope oil fields to shut down?

In the end, officials elected to reopen the terminal, assuring an uninterrupted flow of oil to the West Coast, which depends on the pipeline for about a third of its supply. In part, Valdez officials said, they have come to realize how the large array of oil spill response and monitoring equipment already in place serves as an anti-terrorist asset as well. From the Coast Guard station, radar monitors display every tanker, tugboat, fishing boat and skiff from Valdez through Prince William Sound. “We even pick up the occasional bird,” Ropella said.

“A lot of what we’re doing for oil spill prevention can help us in terms of assuring safe movement of vessels through this port,” Ranger said. “But I wouldn’t say we’re confident. There is no longer any such thing as confidence.”