by Bill Symes and Elaina Thompson
Special to the Weekly
At 8:23 a.m. on May 3, Elaina Thompson answered her ringing phone to find herself speaking to the U.S. Coast Guard.
For most folks, a call from the Coast Guard would be a bit of a surprise, to say the least, but not so for Elaina, who is executive director of Islands’ Oil Spill Association.
IOSA is a community-based first-responder organization aimed at safeguarding the San Juan Islands from marine oil pollution. Calls from the Coast Guard to its executive director can occur at any time of day and any time of year, on New Year’s Eve or July 4 or on a random sunny morning in May. While not exactly welcome, these calls go straight to the reason that IOSA exists.
On this day, the Coast Guard duty officer explained to Thompson that late the night before, a fisherman had fallen asleep at the helm of his large wooden fish boat in Haro Strait, west of Henry Island. No longer under control, the boat had rammed the south tip of the island. Its old wooden hull did not take kindly to this treatment and began to sink as water flooded into the boat’s interior through the breach opened by the collision. The skipper had called the Coast Guard, who rescued him and his dog from the sinking vessel. The wreck was soon lying on the bottom in 37 feet of water.
The duty officer asked Thompson if IOSA could quickly visit the site of the wreck, assess the danger of oil products fouling the shoreline, and report back. Unfortunately, IOSA’s response vessel had just been hauled for maintenance. Thompson called IOSA Operations Manager Rick Winings. They arranged for him to be aboard a boat helmed by an IOSA tier-one (response-trained) volunteer, headed out of Roche Harbor toward the wreck.
Arriving off Henry Island at around 10:30 a.m., Winings found a TowBoatUS vessel already on site. With the help of side-scan sonar, they soon located the sunken boat and anchored a buoy to mark its approximate position. They could both see and smell diesel oil on the water and reported this and the wreck’s location to USCG and WA State Department of Ecology. A sorbent sweep towed through the visible sheen came up with little color; off-road diesel is dyed red, so this suggested that the oil then in the water had been spread out by the fast tidal current and might be difficult to recover.
A little while later, Brendan Cowan, director of the San Juan County Department of Emergency Management, and a responder from DOE overflew the site in a float plane chartered by DOE and got some aerial photographs of the slick. Aerial views of active incidents are one of the best ways to view the spread of oil on water.
Phone calls continued throughout the day to arrange local logistics and coordinate between IOSA, USCG, DOE and DEM.
The next morning the agencies and industry partners had organized to manage the response. Thompson was back on the phone at IOSA HQ and Winings was on scene with IOSA tier one volunteers assisting Republic Services to deploy a containment boom as indicated in a GRP to protect a vulnerable cove on Henry Island.
Unfortunately, high winds were forecast for the next 24 hours which would render the boom ineffective, so out it came and back into its storage trailer. Another IOSA volunteer assisted Focus Wildlife in scanning for oiled birds and distressed mammals until the weather system arrived that evening.
The USCG contracted with Global Diving and Salvage, a major salvage firm with facilities in several mainland ports, to manage recovery of the wreck. They were on scene within 24 hours with divers to plug the fuel vents on the vessel to stop the pollution, and shortly after that process, they had an underwater rover robot in action to track the vessel’s movement down-slope in the heavy current. Once the weather had calmed a bit, the rover was back underwater verifying that the condition of the hull was stable enough to be lifted safely with slings and a crane. On the seventh day after the wreck, the hulk was lifted out of 70-plus feet of water onto a barge and taken to a salvage yard.
Thompson pointed out that this incident wrapping up within seven days “… is actually incredibly fast, especially considering this was a remote location, with people and equipment coming from far away. It doesn’t always go that well. Sometimes you have severe weather delays. Sometimes you have a lack of resources available. Sometimes the boat moves deep underwater rendering it unsafe to pull without specialized equipment. Sometimes ownership is obscure, who’s going to pay slows response, and what’s going to happen depends on a number of factors … In this case, the State and the Coast Guard decided to open up their funding to get this vessel out of the water due to its environmentally sensitive location and risk of pollution.”
IOSA trains its volunteers to be first on-site, to assess the hazards and pollution risks and to communicate the details through HQ (Thompson and her phone). Thompson relays the information to USCG and other responding agencies and their industry partners, and, when so requested, directs IOSA response through Winings, or through a lead tier one volunteer to undertake initial mitigation measures and to assist other responders as appropriate.
In 2023 and 2024 IOSA responded to 31 oil spills within the San Juan Islands. As long as humans use boats to ply local waterways for commercial and recreational purposes, there will always be a next time, and there will always be a need for IOSA within the remote waters of San Juan County. Thompson knows that before too long she’ll pick up her phone once again to find the U.S. Coast Guard on the line. Until then …
Thanks to Rick Winings for his help in developing this story, also Kari Koski and Brendan Cowan for helpful input.
Contributed photo.
