PORTLAND (AP) — State and federal response officials said they should have been notified earlier after a fuel barge was grounded in the Columbia River last year, according to documents released by the Coast Guard.
No fuel spilled after the New Dawn, owned and piloted by Tidewater Barge Lines of Vancouver, ran aground on an uncharted mud shoal near the Hood River shortly after 3 a.m. on July 9, 2009.
But spill response officials from Washington, Oregon and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in a debriefing weeks later that they should have been told sooner and the response should have been more aggressive.
Documents compiled from the debriefing were released to The Oregonian after the newspaper requested them and after the Coast Guard completed its accident investigation.
“We have a protocol with the Coast Guard that vessel incidents that present a potential for spill should be treated the same as an actual spill, and that didn’t happen in this case,” said Ron Holcomb, a spill responder with the Washington Department of Ecology.
The Coast Guard and Tidewater, citing the soft river bottom and the barge’s double hull, judged spill risk as very low and treated the grounding as a relatively simple “salvage operation.”
“We don’t see a barge soft aground,” Holcomb said. “We see a million gallons of gasoline in a place where it’s not supposed to be.”
The 1,500-foot safety zone established around the 282-foot barge would have been too small if a leak occurred, the spill response agencies said in the debriefing.
The agencies were late to establish a unified command center, so Tidewater assumed the “primary leadership role” and set up the command center in Vancouver rather than near the accident site. And there was “limited coordination between agencies on response and management issues,” the documents said.
The documents underscore the complexity of spill response on the Columbia, which relies on multiple federal and state agencies as well as local officials.
Officials from Tidewater and the Coast Guard have since agreed to quickly notify the spill response agencies even if there’s only potential for a spill, Tidewater officials and regulators said.
“Going forward if there’s a fuel barge grounding, the expectation is that immediately, in addition to a salvage component, there has to be a spill prevention component,” said John Pigott, assistant to Tidewater’s president.
Richard Franklin, the EPA’s Portland-based spill response coordinator, said the agency regularly drills with barge companies, the Coast Guard and spill responders. The Coast Guard has already notified EPA more quickly in subsequent incidents in the Columbia and off the coast, he said.
