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12.23.99 07:00:46
Oil-spill settlement
assigns $18 million
to restore wildlife
The agreement by Eklof Marine, responsible for the 1996 spill, sets a precedent for restoring the environment from oil-spill damage. It follows Tuesday's $10-million settlement with lobstermen.
By PETER B. LORD
Journal Environment Writer
PROVIDENCE
-- Governor Almond and much of the state's congressional delegation announced a historic settlement with insurers covering the North Cape oil spill yesterday. It calls for spending at least $18 million to replace the lobsters, loons, clams, and fish killed by the 1996 spill, the state's worst.
The agreement, resulting from nearly four years of scientific studies and negotiations, amounts to a second big Christmas-week reparation by those who caused the spill. On Tuesday, the insurers settled a damage suit by 110 local lobstermen for $10 million.
Yesterday's agreement also sets a national precedent for reparations after oil spills. Several top federal officials said yesterday that the North Cape settlement was so successful that it would be used to guide others around the country who are hit by bad spills.
The settlement calls for most of the same restoration steps proposed a year ago by state and federal negotiators. The cost dropped from the original estimate of $27.6 million -- largely due to changes in restoration plans because of new information on such diverse subjects as the sex lives of loons to the mortality rates of baby clams.
If the agreement is approved in court, restoration efforts should begin next spring, state officials said. And it shouldn't take long before Rhode Islanders see results, both economic and environmental.
The agreement calls for Eklof Marine Corp., the company held responsible for the spill, to spend $8 million to $10 million, replacing the 9 million juvenile and adult lobsters lost in the spill.
Eklof's insurer, West of England Ship Owners Mutual Insurance Association, must pay an additional $8 million for other restoration efforts and it must pay $2 million to $3 million more to the state and federal governments to compensate them for negotiating the plan and supervising the work.
Here are the key steps to be taken:
 Eklof agrees to buy 1.248 million adult female lobsters during the next 3 to 5 years, notch their tails and drop them into Block Island Sound. Fishermen will be barred from keeping any notched lobster -- the notches should last up to two years -- so the lobsters should be able to reproduce and replace those killed by the spill.
$3 million will be spent on shoreline nesting sites for loons, and $400,000 will go toward eider duck nesting sites -- all in northern New England -- to help replace 2,292 seabirds killed by the spill.
$1.6 million will be spent on development rights to land around the South County salt ponds, protecting them from septic-system pollution that limits the ponds' productivity.
$1.5 million will go toward removing quahogs from the Providence shipping channel as it's being dredged and transplanting them to sanctuaries for two years. The goal is to replace about a million pounds of shellfish killed in the spill.
$140,000 will go for cages to protect piping plovers on the South County beaches; $160,000 will be spent on fish ladders to help bring back anadromous fish such as herring; and $800,000 will be paid to the trustees to monitor the lobster program.
DOZENS
of state and federal officials joined in the State House Rotunda yesterday afternoon to celebrate the deal. One after another, they talked about where they were during the stormy night of Jan. 19, 1996, when the tug Scandia caught fire and the barge North Cape was driven ashore on Matunuck, spilling 828,000 gallons of home heating oil.
``I'll never forget walking the beach with my wife the day after the spill,'' Almond said. ``It was covered with dead lobsters, clams and fish, along with hundreds of oiled birds.''
Ronald E. Lambertson, regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, recalled inspecting Trustom Pond and finding every organism in its once pristine waters dead. He said, ``This was the most significant spill to impact a national wildlife refuge since Exxon Valdez.''
U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, who was a congressman at the time, said he got word as he was leaving a high-rise in Pawtucket, and U.S. Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee recalled thinking, ``Who would be out on such a stormy night?''
U.S. Rep. Robert A. Weygand was lieutenant governor that ``terrible night'' and he said, by the time he got to Galilee, Almond was already there and on the phone with President Clinton, asking for help.
Weygand pointed out that Eklof and its insurers have paid a heavy price for the spill: $9.5 million in criminal penalties, $10 million to the lobstermen, $10 million in cleanup costs, $6 million to settle various insurance claims and then yesterday's $18-million settlement -- totaling well over $50 million.
``This was a very, very expensive proposition for those who would violate our shore,'' Weygand said.
Yesterday was also an opportunity to give credit to those who have worked ever since the spill on cleanup efforts and on the restoration negotiations.
Stephen G. Morin, head of emergency response for the state Department of Environmental Management, and Claude Cote, a DEM lawyer, represented Rhode Island.
Charles Hebert, head of national wildlife refuges in Rhode Island, was cited by Lambertson for working 20-hour days immediately following the spill -- trying to save oiled birds and threatened ponds -- and still working four years later on the settlement.
THE NORTH CAPE
spill was the first to follow new regulations in the Oil Spill Act of 1990 that radically changed the methods for assessing environmental damage.
Before the North Cape, oil companies and the government each hired lawyers and launched titanic battles over the economic value of whatever natural resources were destroyed, according to Frank O'Connor, acting general counsel for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which administers the oil-spill law.
A good example is the Exxon Valdez. The oil was spilled more than 10 years ago, and lawyers are still fighting over damages.
Just days before the North Cape spill, NOAA issued new rules designed to get environmental damage remedied faster and more effectively. The rules called for polluters to work cooperatively with federal and local interests, as a group of trustees, to assess spill damage, to recommend solutions and to carry them out.
``I remember right after the spill [the late] Sen. John Chafee asked me what we would do,'' O'Connor said. ``I promised the senator we would do everything in our power to bring back these resources, and I think today we are keeping that promise.''
Starting the day after the spill, Morin and Hebert and representatives of NOAA met with consultants for Eklof and began hiring scientists, many from URI, to assess the damages.
Early studies estimated more than 12 million lobsters were killed, along with 82 million crabs, 679 million mussels and 81 million surf clams.
The numbers changed as more research was done, and in September 1998 the trustees announced a $28.3-million plan to replace the lost resources.
There were some objections, particularly to plans to spend $9.4 million to buy lakefront nesting sites in Maine for the loons. Eklof objected too, and the talks wore on.
Morin said new information offered at hearings and by Eklof helped the trustees scale down their restoration plans, and eventually reach yesterday's settlement.
One discovery: a significant number of adult loons don't breed. The original goal of replacing all 400 dead loons and all their potential young assumed that all the adults would raise young.
But when the trustees learned that some 30 percent of adults don't breed, that changed the equation and the trustees trimmed the loon project back from $10.9 million to $3 million.
The shellfishing-restoration plan was similarly scaled back. The trustees had planned to cast millions of seed shellfish into the surf. But they later agreed that would not only be dangerous for workers, it would basically end up feeding seedlings to voracious crabs.
So they changed the plan and agreed to use big clams from the Providence River.
``This was never a punitive issue,'' Morin said. ``We never talked about dollars -- until the end. Everyone was guided by the same goal: what would it take to restore the environment?''
MORIN SAID
a key development occurred earlier this year when the Justice Department ruled that, if Eklof didn't agree to the plan, Rhode Island could tap a Coast Guard fund and the Coast Guard could sue Eklof for restitution.
``After that, it became clear they'd have to pay one way or another, and they'd gain nothing by delaying,'' Morin said.
O'Connor said several other spills have occurred since the North Cape, and the new scientific assessment methods are being used to plan restoration.
He said he plans to gather the North Cape trustees to analyze their negotiations, to recommend ways to speed the process, and to tell others how they did it.
``These guys can show everybody else in the country, because they did it first, and they did it beautifully,'' he said.
No one from Eklof attended the news conference. But Deming Sherman, Eklof's local counsel, issued a statement saying the company hoped the recent agreements addressed the consequences of the spill, ``most specifically, the damages caused to the local environment and the economic losses suffered by area lobstermen.''
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