Month: January 2013

Long-time staff member Stan Jones to retire

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Stan Jones, the council’s director of administration and external affairs, will be retiring after more than 17 years of service to the council.

Born in Anchorage, Jones worked in newspapers and public radio before joining the citizens’ council in 1997. His stories for the Anchorage Daily News on the Exxon Valdez spill helped the paper win several regional and national awards.

Jones spent his first nine years at the council as the public information manager and was promoted to the role of director of external affairs in 2006. In 2010, he was further promoted to the position of director of administration and external affairs.

Jones has been instrumental in ensuring that the public and the media had access to accurate information about the council and its issues. During his tenure, he wrote numerous press releases, guest opinions and other educational and promotional pieces. He also managed the yearly recertification applications to the U.S. Coast Guard.

Jones worked closely with the council’s Legislative Affairs Committee to monitor developments in the Alaska Legislature and the U.S. Congress on matters related to the council’s mission. He worked with elected officials such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. Mark Begich, and Rep. Don Young to secure passage of federal legislation to permanently preserve Prince William Sound’s system of double escort tugs for loaded oil tankers.

“Stan Jones is in a league all his own with his ability to articulate to the general public why oil spill prevention and response issues matter,” said Mark Swanson, executive director of the council, “Stan can justifiably share a lot of credit for many advances in prevention and response the council has seen during his tenure.”

Jones co-authored an award-winning book, “The Spill: Personal Stories from the Exxon Valdez Disaster,” an oral history of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The book featured personal stories about the spill from over 60 people who experienced the disaster first-hand. The book was released in 2009 to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Exxon spill.

Outside of his work at the council, Jones has written a series of four mystery novels about a character named Nathan Active. Nathan is an Inupiat Eskimo and Alaska State Trooper who solves crimes in the fictional village of Chukchi, north of the Arctic Circle.

Jones has quite a few plans post-retirement, including the continuation of the Nathan Active series. He has ideas for more novels, one of which has the working title of “Spenard Road.” He also plans to work two days a week at a federal agency dealing with natural gas projects in Alaska.

“We are going to miss him in the work place but hope to see him around and will certainly be looking for more books from Stan’s ever-fertile pen,” Swanson said.

In March, Jones and his wife, Susan, plan to “try to” drive to the community of Tuktoyaktuk, located on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. The community is only accessible by car during the winter months via the Tuktoyaktuk Winter Road, featured in the History Channel’s program, Ice Road Truckers.

Fall drills and exercises test industry spill response plans

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By ROY ROBERTSON
Council Project Manager

This past October 3 and 4, Tesoro conducted the annual large-scale oil spill response exercise to test the Prince William Sound Tanker Oil Discharge Prevention and Contingency Plan.

The scenario imagined that, during inclement weather, an outbound partially loaded tanker struck an unknown object near Glacier Island and suffered a breached hull. The tanker instantaneously released a simulated 20,000 barrels of North Slope crude oil. The vessel sustained no further damage and the bad weather eased as the response continued with no further release of oil.

The first 12 hours of the exercise was led by Alyeska’s Ship Escort/Response Vessel System, or SERVS, as would happen in the case of a real spill.

After 12 hours, Tesoro’s response team took command of the response efforts, with continued help from SERVS.

The main focus of this year’s exercise was to test the following objectives:
• Communications between the command center in Valdez and the field regarding equipment staging and protection of shorelines, nearshore areas, and wildlife
• Logistical support for tracking the operation and resources
• Use of the fishing vessel oil spill response fleet
• Management, staffing, and set-up of equipment staging areas

The drill was a table-top exercise. No equipment or vessels were deployed except for equipment staging areas in Cordova and Whittier.

Council staff participated in various roles and helped evaluate the responders.

Some lessons were noted by the council evaluators:
• Communications between the equipment staging areas and the command post could be improved.
• An actual incident would require more Internet connections and phone lines at the command center.
• The coordination of the wildlife efforts could be improved to insure a more efficient response to the oiled wildlife.

This exercise provided a very good interaction between the industry and agencies’ response teams.

Terminal exercise conducted in November

On November 8, Alyeska conducted an exercise at the Valdez Marine Terminal.

This exercise imagined a 90,000-barrel crude oil spill into the Port of Valdez due to ruptured piping at one of the terminal’s loading berths. The spilled oil moved toward the city of Valdez, so city officials participated as part of the spill response leadership team, known as the Unified Command. Council staff members served as evaluators or as part of the drill team.

This exercise was a precursor to next summer’s National Preparedness for Response Exercise Program, which will be led by the Coast Guard. There was good participation by the Coast Guard and the state agencies in November’s exercise. One of the high points of this exercise was a change in the trajectory from the scenario in the plan that pushed oil toward the city of Valdez.

This caused response actions that focused on protecting the public. Lessons noted by council evaluators included:
• Notifications need to be improved.
• Reorganization of the Valdez Emergency Operations Center made the space more efficient.
• This drill used real time as opposed to the artificial timeframes used in other drills. This made the activities more realistic.

Whittier spill response exercise

On December 7, SERVS conducted an oil spill response exercise in Whittier.

Local fishing vessels, part of the industry’s oil spill fishing vessel response program, participated in the exercise. All the fishing vessels were Tier 1. Tier 1 boats are the earliest responders in case of a spill.

Participants were able to practice tactics such as exclusion and deflection booming. These tactics would be used in case of a real spill, to direct oil away from environmentally sensitive areas.

Council staff was on hand to observe the drill activities.

Bob Jaynes works hard to protect beloved Sound

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In a conversation with Robert “Bob” Jaynes, his dedication to and love of Prince William Sound is immediately apparent.

Jaynes has been a member of the council’s Port Operations and Vessel Traffic System since 2004, chairing that committee since 2006. He has been operating a boat on the Sound for 22 years, licensed as a captain by the Coast Guard for 18 of those years.

Originally from California, Jaynes’ work first brought him to Alaska in the 1980s while working for the Air Force.

“After working several different jobs, like you do when you’re in your younger years,” Jaynes said, “I finally ended up working civil service at McClellan Air Force Base.”

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From our Executive Director: What will it take to get the best available escort and towing technology for Prince William Sound?

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• Mark Swanson is executive director of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council.

Alaska law requires the use of best available technology in certain areas of state-approved spill prevention and response plans, also known as contingency plans.

Theoretically, these requirements should help us keep abreast of advances in technology. In reality, this provision of Alaska law is difficult to enforce and is achieved only infrequently.

In our view, the recent incident with Shell Oil’s Kulluk offshore drill rig is an object lesson in the need for best available technology in towing operations and equipment, a lesson that should be applied in Prince William Sound.

The citizens’ council, working with the internationally respected naval architecture firm of Robert Allan Limited, completed a major study last fall that recommended, among other things, the installation of best available technology in the context of towing equipment on the tugs that escort loaded oil tankers through Prince William Sound.

Specifically, the study spotlighted the need for more modern tow and escort winches that can render and recover (that is, pay out and reel in) a tow line under full load. The winches now on the Sound’s tugs represent 15-year-old technology and they don’t reel in or pay out well under load.

The more modern winches recommended by the Robert Allan study help preserve the ability to apply full towing force while reducing or eliminating the huge tow line surges that come from vessels getting thrown around in big seas. This newer type of tow winch is designed to help prevent tow line failure by reducing shock loading on the system.

Most towing and tethering exercises in Prince William Sound are conducted in relatively calm weather. The vulnerabilities of the old winches and the advantages of the new winches do not become apparent until the weather gets rough. With so many successful escorts and exercises, industry and the regulators have grown comfortable with the old-style winches on the Sound’s tugs. Confident we have a great escort system, Alyeska, and the state declined to act on any of our towing equipment study recommendations. Similar recommendations arising from an escort tug study by the international ship classification society Det Norske Veritas or DNV a year earlier were also dismissed by industry and the state.

Now, however, we have the example of a real-world heavy-weather emergency towing effort before us and the results are not reassuring. The Kulluk incident, which saw loss of tow no fewer than five times before the rig grounded on a small island near Kodiak, demonstrated just how difficult it is to make towing vessels and equipment work in severe Alaskan weather.

With its recent approval of the tanker contingency plan prepared by the oil industry, the state has signed off on the notion that the Prince William Sound tugs and their towing gear can prevent serious incidents involving loaded oil tankers in Prince William Sound and offshore out to about 17 miles. We regard this proposition as unproven.

Bad storms just outside of the Hinchinbrook entrance are definitely well within the realm of possibility. Storms of the magnitude encountered by the Kulluk are actually somewhat more frequent where the tankers travel than in the western Gulf of Alaska where the Shell rig ran into trouble, causing meteorologists over the past four decades to give the northeast corner of the Gulf of Alaska the nickname “Coffin Corner”.

Tankers are not allowed to leave the Sound if weather exceeds 15-foot seas and 45-knot winds, but that is no guarantee they will avoid extreme conditions. The well-known coastal weather phenomenon called barrier jets often creates high winds and big waves just outside Hinchinbrook Entrance, even when the weather inside is much milder. The question raised is obvious: What if the Kulluk had been a loaded oil tanker experiencing a loss of power in similar wind and sea states or during a barrier jet event along the rugged coast just outside Hinchinbrook?

I don’t think the citizens’ council, the oil industry, or its regulators know the answer to that question, and it’s time we did.

Our group will persist in our polite requests for information on the performance of the Prince William Sound tugs, as well as the equipment and failure modes on the other vessels involved in the Kulluk incident.

This is directly within our mandate. In fact, it’s at the heart of that mandate, as it pertains to design and operation of a robust tug escort system capable of making sure there’s not another Exxon Valdez-scale catastrophe in the Sound or along the coast.

There will likely be resistance by the oil shipping industry to sharing this knowledge. Experience has shown that procedural and secrecy issues surrounding official accident investigations delay and dilute the release of information, but it is important that we and others with shared concerns keep up our calls for transparency and accountability.

A new study commissioned by our council is just getting under way. It will look at all the roles the Prince William Sound tugs are asked to fill not only in preventing tanker accidents, but also in starting the response if prevention fails.

We look forward to receiving the results of that study and combining it with what we learn from the Kulluk incident to advocate for the best available technology to reduce risks for tankers inside and outside of Prince William Sound.

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