Digital Extra

But for the next 30 hours, none of Peek's gear could do anything for him. An angry sea washed across the leaking barge.

Offshore, the tugboat Houma from Fall River, waited with its barge, Essex, which could hold more than 1 million gallons of oil.

Despite the high seas, the strike force set the salvage process in motion -- inspecting the barge and taking soundings to determine how much oil had leaked.

When the results came in, Lionel Bryant, a strike team public affairs officer, recalled the immediate shift from optimism to despair: The barge had gushed 700,000 gallons of No. 2 fuel oil.

As news of the spill filtered through Rhode Island, the curious began to gather on the beaches flanking Moonstone. And people were stunned by what they saw.

Near the Scandia, inshore from the barge, oil stained the sea a dark pink, like water-thinned blood. The air was pungent with the smell of fuel oil, a smell fraught with the sharp edge of turpentine. Waves crashed ashore with fresh cargoes of the dying and the dead, refugees from a toxic sea.

Beachgoers who picked up dying lobsters couldn't decide whether they should take them from their environment or toss them back to the poisoned sea; there was a sense, visible on people's faces, of helplessness. The helplessness turned to anger at the delay in pumping out the barge.

"There's frustration, anger, doubt, whatever adjectives you want to use," said Peek.

But in fact, weather was driving everything.

Pumping did not begin until 11 a.m. Sunday. The barge sat hard aground for seven days. And the tugboat Scandia has not budged.