Digital Extra

A powerful network of tugboat owners has displayed great skill in fending off regulations aimed at the growing oil-barge industry.

Their success, critics say, led to conditions that allow accidents like the North Cape oil spill along South County's pristine shoreline.

Despite repeated accidents and investigations that call for more regulation, the Coast Guard and Congress have been slow to enact recommended reforms.

In fact, these regulatory agencies have bent to industry demands for regulatory restraint, permitting tugboats to go uninspected even while the size of barges and tugs -- and their potential to cause widespread environmental pollution -- has grown dramatically.

In a move that reveals how little tugboats are regulated on these journeys, the Coast Guard is just now approving measures that would require tug operators to carry some basic equipment:

A compass and a chart.

Sarah Chasis, a lawyer for the National Resources Defense Council, which led a 1994 lawsuit against the Coast Guard over oil-transport regulations, calls the Coast Guard's failure to act for so long "scandalous."

"When it comes to going up against the tanker industry or taking a strong leadership role, they're just not willing to do it," Chasis said.

With the North Cape, she added, "we're seeing the results of their failure to take action."

Industry executives and lobbyists, however, maintain that self-regulation has worked well for the industry and the public, and that Coast Guard inspections or other government regulations would not have prevented the North Cape accident.

"The public has to look at the volume of oil, especially this winter, and compare it to the number of accidents that occurred," said Mortimer S. Bouchard III, a New York tug owner.

THE HUB OF the Northeast's oil-barge distribution network is a slice of water in New York Harbor that tug skippers simply call "The Kill."

The Kill Van Kull separates New Jersey, with its acres of oil tanks, from the grimy Staten Island waterfront, where guard dogs and chain-link fences protect the tugboat docks.

The tugboat companies plying the kill are family-owned: Rienauer, Bouchard, Moran. Among them is Eklof Marine, owner of the tug Scandia and the barge North Cape which, starting on Jan. 19, spilled 828,000 of No. 2 heating oil in Block Island Sound. There has been no indication or allegation that Eklof was operating outside the bounds of Coast Guard regulations.

Tugs belonging to Eklof and about 20 other companies churn through the kill every hour, day and night, loading "product" into petroleum barges before heading for New England ports. They pass hundreds of miles of environmentally sensitive coastline, towing their toxic cargoes.

WHY HAS New England come to rely so heavily on tugs and barges for its energy needs?

Price.

Oceangoing oil tankers are expensive to build, expensive to maintain and expensive to operate. A single ship may cost up to $60 million to build and equip, and it must be manned by a crew of up to 25 people. Its safety systems and related regulations are myriad and complicated.

Tugboats and oil barges, by contrast, are a bargain, both to build and run.

A tugboat costs up to $7 million to build, and a new barge costs $15 million, the industry says. It requires a crew of six with fewer qualifications than tanker crews.

Not surprisingly, lower costs have fueled a boom in barge construction. And to keep up with demand for oil, the size of the barges has grown quickly. In the 1960s, oil barges held up to 10,000 barrels of cargo. Barges today can hold as much as 300,000 barrels.

The barge North Cape that ran aground on Moonstone Beach was carrying 95,000 barrels, equivalent to 4 million gallons of home heating oil.

Shipbuilders have packed more horsepower on tugboats to better haul the larger barges through the sea.

REGULATIONS HAVE not kept up with changes in the industry, however. For instance, although the barges are bigger, the majority of them are unmanned and not required to have anchors that could be used to stop them in an emergency.

Also, barge operators are permitted to fill barges beyond their ocean-going capacity for transit through Block Island Sound, Rhode Island Sound and Buzzard's Bay, even though extremely rough seas are common there.

Is weak regulation a question of lawmakers not paying attention, or effective lobbying by the industry?

Observers say it's both.

When powered by steam, tugs fell under a federal law that required the captain to have a master pilot's license and the tugs to be inspected. But after World War II, diesel oil replaced steam as the fuel for tugs and the federal law no longer applied.

After that, just about anybody could pilot a tug -- and just about anybody did.

"New vessels were often operated by unlicensed personnel with minimal qualifications," a 1993 Coast Guard study of tugs found.

The results weren't pretty. Accidents increased through the 1960s and early '70s, said the study. It soon became clear -- even to Congress -- that something had to be done.

So in 1972, Congress passed a law requiring that the operators of uninspected tugs under 200 gross tons have a license. Not the more stringent, master pilot's license. Just a license.

But the criteria the law established to get this license were minimal: three years of experience on a tug and the ability to pass a written exam.

The tug and barge industry made sure it wouldn't be too hard to get a license.

Throughout congressional hearings, the towing industry maintained that with their limited education, many seamen would find it extremely difficult to pass an examination, the Coast Guard found. To satisfy the industry, Congress simplified the test.

Little, if anything, has changed since 1972 in the licensing requirements.

And the industry, the Coast Guard has found, has been building tugs just below the 200-gross-ton threshold, thereby escaping the need for a master pilot's license. The Scandia, with a rating of 198 gross tons, is a perfect example.

Gregory Aitken, captain of the grounded Scandia, is a licensed master pilot. In other words, he had more credentials than the law required.

Laws regarding the inspection of tugs have also remained lax. Only tugs over 300 gross tons have to be inspected. That means most of them never are.

AFTER 1972, it would be 21 years before Congress would again take up the issue of uninspected tugs. And as before, it would take injury and death to prompt legislative action.

In September 1993, Amtrak's Sunset Limited was cruising at 70 mph over a bridge north of Mobile, Ala., when suddenly a span of the bridge collapsed. Three locomotives and four passenger cars cascaded into the waters of the Big Bayou Canot. Forty-seven people lost their lives.

When investigators asked why the bridge gave way, their attention was drawn to a flotilla of six barges, led by an uninspected tug, in the Mobile River below. They theorized that one of the barges may have hit the bridge support, destabilizing the bridge and ultimately causing the tragic derailment.

A flurry of government activity followed the demise of the Sunset Limited, but it produced little in the way of change.

Rep. Gerry E. Studds of Massachusetts introduced a bill that would have increased licensing requirements for tug operators and required inspection of tugs involved in oil shipping.

Studds's bill passed the House, but died in the Senate Commerce Committee. Some observers said it succumbed to lobbying by the industry's trade group, American Waterways Operators, with a staff of 15 in Washington.

"The tug and barge industry has strenuously opposed regulation because -- guess what -- it costs money," observed Chris Mann, a staffer with the House Resources Committee in Washington, D.C.

But others said the Coast Guard convinced the committee the bill wasn't needed. Noting human error is to blame for 80 percent of tug accidents, the Coast Guard said training and licensing, alone -- not routine inspections -- would suffice to improve safety in the industry. Inspections, it said, would also cost millions in new manpower and paperwork.

While Congress debated Studds's bill, the Coast Guard was completing an in-house review of uninspected tugs. It detailed regulatory lapses and acknowledged that licensing requirements are inadequate.

The knowledge required for an operator's license "may have been adequate for all vessels in 1972, (but) additional knowledge, skills and abilities are required to operate high horsepower towing vessels," the Coast Guard concluded.

TO ADDRESS these and other safety concerns, the Coast Guard has worked with its in-house Towing Safety Advisory Committee, a panel that is dominated by industry and trade representatives.

The committee helped draft new measures, which will take effect this year, that will require basic equipment on tugs for the first time, such as a compass, chart, a searchlight, two VHF radios, depth-finder and radar.

The regulations also are intended to ensure tug pilots know how to use radar, but the Coast Guard has not yet enacted significant personnel licensing reforms.

Sophisticated safety gear of the kind carried on oil tankers, such as automatic fire-extinguishing systems for the engine room, also are not covered in the new rules.

Last week, a Coast Guard lieutenant who is investigating the cause of the grounding of the North Cape said the absence of an automatic fire suppression system aboard the tug Scandia allowed an engine fire to get out of hand. The fire forced the crew to abandon the tug and tow.

THE GOVERNMENT had another chance to boost safety measures in this decade, but again, critics charge, the Coast Guard failed to act. Responding to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, widely referred to as OPA '90.

The act requires that, by 2015, tankers and oil barges be double-hulled, to prevent oil from escaping if the outer hull is ruptured.

As an interim measure, Congress required the Coast Guard to improve safety regulations for single-hull tankers and barges over 5,000 gross tons, such as the 5,500-gross-ton North Cape.

But the rules never came.

Finally, after a 1994 lawsuit by environmental groups, the Coast Guard last year introduced some minimal changes that will take effect this year. But it did not make meaningful changes, such as reducing internal tank pressure with lighter loads or adding bulkheads inside oil tanks, in effect making double hulls from the inside.

Although those steps could have blocked or slowed the flow of oil from the North Cape into Block Island Sound, the Coast Guard estimated it would be costly to the industry, reducing the carrying capacity by 9 to 19 percent.

"Congress told us that any measures we do in the interim had to be economically feasible," said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Suzanne Englebert. "That's the question we've been trying to determine for five years."

IN THE Kill Van Kull and New York Harbor, bargemen and tug pilots have all been watching news of the North Cape incident on their shipboard televisions.

They believe much of the media coverage has been unfair, contending the focus should be on the rescue of the Scandia's crew, not regulations.

"Here's these guys who survived this fire, and nobody says anything about them," said Harry Andersen, captain of the tug Rhea I. Bouchard. "They want to hang them all."

To demonstrate how self-regulation works, the American Waterways Operators arranged a visit to a barge anchored in New York Harbor.

The $13 million, double-hulled oil barge belongs to Bouchard Transportation. It has comfortable quarters for a crew of two, and is loaded with safety and oil-spill-prevention gear, including an inflatable boat for deploying its own containment boom.

Mortimer S. Bouchard III said his company only operates manned barges and is willing to invest in new equipment because he considers it the best way of doing business.

By contrast, Eklof Marine has fought for the right to have unmanned barges like the North Cape. The company insisted on this right a few years ago, during talks to settle a labor dispute with Local 333 of the International Longshoremen, the union that represents crew members of tugs and barges.

However, Jesse Lewis, an Eklof spokesman speaking about this last week, noted that most of Eklof's barges are manned.

Demands of oil companies and insurance firms force the tugboats to carry safety equipment above and beyond the government's requirements, industry executives say. Eklof and others also adhere to a set of new, self-imposed operating guidelines through the American Waterways Operators.

"This industry is very proud of our record. We police each other, and I think the public doesn't give us enough credit," said Bouchard.

"Every owner and operator supports Eklof 100 percent," Bouchard added.

BUT CRITICS say the industry has proven time and again that it can't police itself. As proof, they point to a woman, whose tug and barge companies were so notorious for disregarding the law, she is known as the "Dragonlady."

Evelyn Berman Frank.

Matriarch, convicted polluter, the woman behind a massive 1994 oil spill that fouled Puerto Rico's beaches. After years of environmental violations, including the repeated illegal dumping of sludge and toxins into New York Harbor, state officials finally shut down Frank's business.

But the industry says companies like Frank's are the exception. As proof of their good track record, they point to the number of accident-free trips they make to New England.

Bouchard called the Scandia a "freak accident."

How about the North Cape? If it had been a manned barge, could the worst oil spill in Rhode Island's history have been averted? No one knows for sure, said Bouchard.

"That's all hypothetical."