The Committee

Back in the day, a couple three years after the Exxon Valdez accident up in Prince William Sound, I happened to be working for the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve down in Charleston on the south coast. It was, still is as far as I know, kind of a bastard amalgam of the Oregon Division of State Lands and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is way too many acronyms for rational thought, but what I was doing was the more or less maintenance function on a 5,000 acre woodland/wetland reserve that also had a number of public and office buildings, science facilities that weren’t much in those days, lots of vehicles and some boats and kayaks. Plenty of stuff to keep a guy busy. You would think.

Now right after the tanker accident folks on the west coast, particularly in state government, got pretty excited about the locks on the barn door and whether or not the horses were gone. The Oregon Legislature put up some money and commissioned a study of the transportation of petroleum products through the waters of the state. Which resulted in  a committee being formed, and hearings being held by said committee, and they gave us a  secretary and some funds for paper and pencils and doughnuts, so to speak.

On the committee were  a handsome young Coast Guard LT-J, G Paul Nelson, who became later a player for ODEQ,  Rudy Gorst, known in Coos Bay as “The Clam Diver”, a truly weird member of the concerned public who had without a doubt the most annoying verbal tics and neologisms, who also I found out, was a transsexual wannabe, long before I crossed the line, some anonymous shipping broker/freighter operator who never showed up, a no-nonsense towboater executive named Dick Lauer from Sause Bros Ocean Towing,  and tall skinny Minnie Mouse-voiced Mike Graybill, the director of the Reserve where I worked, who couldn't be arsed to go to the meetings because they could not possibly enhance his career so grudgingly  allowed me to go in his place. He did finally show up at the last meeting when we gave final approval to the report, horses long over the horizon. But for a year and a half I sat on that gang and hashed out the implications.

Which as it turned out, meant every other month driving up Highway 101 to Loincoln City, Oregon, to some kind of a beach-front convention hotel, and endless hours in committee drinking coffee and eating little box lunches while discussing the ins and outs of the oil transportation business.

Now I’m a lifelong underachiever, but I love the water, and those of the waterfront, and I spend a lot of time in places that would not benefit from contact with petroleum products. I found a way, fairly quickly, to contribute by becoming a voice of reason that could articulate what these guys were trying to say to each other, and I had the middle ground everywhere I looked, and they were, I like to think, grateful for my way with words if not my actual presence. I learned a hell of a lot. We published a report with recommendations that were eventually turned into Oregon State government policy in the form of Best Practices and specific laws.

That's the tanker at anchor out in the stream, with a Tidewater fuel Barge tied up alongside if you blow this way up you see the blue fuel hose looped under that white boom-crane. The spill response vessel is right there next to the action. Two big Shaver Co tugboats, nice new beefy looking vessels were just out of sight on both ends of this operation. Of course that's my dory on the beach and I was like a kid at the circus watching this all unfold

SO when I got out to the island last week and I had things all set up and sat down on the sand to see what was going on out on the river, I just about jumped out of my chair because all at once I knew exactly what I was seeing, from all those stupid meetings all those years ago. That committee started some shit for sure, and I thought back on what we did.

We thought it was a good idea that when you are transporting oil by tanker, and that tanker is moving through restricted waters, there should be a tugboat standing by just in case something happens with the steering or the power plant. The Shaver tug just out of the picture to the right was there all afternoon, waiting to unmoor the tanker.

If  oil does somehow go in the water, bad things start happening  pretty fast, so we said that when you are actually transferring oil from one vessel to another or to the shore or from the shore it would be nice if there was to be a vessel with some containment booms handy just in case. That’s that smaller but very fancy and shiny silver boat just in front of the tanker. That thing is a fairly expensive piece of kit, a custom welded aluminum high powered jet-drive response vessel owned by the Clean River Consortium, basically a trade association of all the river users that has equipment pre-positioned all around the harbor.

It was there all afternoon, right up in there, and as usual nothing happened and the crew fished and sunbathed and barbecued and generally fucked the dog all afternoon but by god they were there and if something HAD happened they could have had booms in the water in a matter of seconds and skimmers and pumps and extra radios and whatnot Johnny on the spot. Now when a tanker docks or undocks there has to be a second tug, which there was, and the minute the fuel barge was done and towed away by a THIRD tug the two Shaver Ladies hooked up, unmoored the cables from the mooring buoy, helped weigh the anchors and get the tanker turned around and on her way back down the Columbia to the sea. I was astonished and pleased to see the fruits of all that head-aching boredom so many years later. And I was thrilled that I had had a hand in making these beautiful waters safer for everybody, OK, maybe a little bit, not a lot, but some.