Digital Extra

Although the spill is Rhode Island's largest ever, one federal official predicted the ecology will recover.

"The disaster is essentially economic," said Kenneth Sherman, director of a Narragansett laboratory for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Government officials, fishermen and mariners have pulled out their calculators, trying to tally the cost of the disaster. Fishermen have been kept in port, the market for Rhode Island seafood has been hurt, the environment has been sullied and tourism is jeopardized.

Timothy R.E. Keeney, director of the state Department of Environmental Management, publicly suggested the huge financial scope. The fishing industry potentially would lose millions of dollars in the short term and tens of millions of dollars in the long term, he declared early in the week-long crisis.

"There's no guesstimate at this point" of the loss to the state economy, said Marcel A. Valois, executive director of the state Economic Development Corporation. "We'll find out eventually what the cost of all of this was."

But his agency is among those busy working up numbers for the sake of claims for insurance and federal aid. Tourism is a $1.4 billion-a-year industry for Rhode Island and fishing a $500 million-a-year industry.

THE MARKET for Rhode Island seafood has been tarred, at least temporarily, dampening demand and slashing prices for the seafood that can be brought to market safely, according to government and industry sources.

"People are becoming overly cautious," Valois said.

By Tuesday, a video "clipping service" had reported to the state 125 news spots on local and national television showing pictures of the spill. Those negative images must be dispelled so that tourists are not frightened away, said Dawn Giles, spokeswoman for the Economic Development Corporation.

Valois' agency is developing advertising and public relations campaigns to protect the seafood and tourism businesses.

"It's safe to come to Rhode Island to vacation and it's safe to eat our seafood," Valois exclaimed. That message will be pounded home in national and regional press releases and advertising and in person by state ambassadors, officials said.

Health inspectors impounded lobsters and crabs from South County wholesalers and were expected to confiscate seafood from retailers and restaurants if necessary to safeguard the industry's integrity.

The fishing ban in much of Block Island Sound and six coastal ponds will last 20 to 80 days, a NOAA official predicted Friday. That is much more optimistic than an early projection by NOAA that it might be six months before fishing could resume.

PREDICTIONS OF a relatively quick and complete recovery are good news for the North Cape's owner, Eklof Marine, of Staten Island, N.Y., because this spill is the first one to be covered by new damage-assessment regulations under the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990. The act was passed in the wake of the disaster involving the oil tanker Exxon Valdez in 1989.

Under the old practice, the government and the pollution culprit would haggle over the cost of the environmental damage and set a dollar amount, and then the government would decide how to spend it, explained Eliot Hurwitz of NOAA. Now, the environment must be returned to its pre-spill condition, and it must be determined in advance how that can be achieved. The last step is assessing the cost for the necessary work, he said. If the ecology is not irreparably harmed, then Eklof Marine's cost could be lower than it would have been under the previous rules for damage assessment.

Financial damages for the oil spill from the tanker World Prodigy off Newport in June 1989 were $6.55 million. But the cleanup was largely successful. The tanker owner agreed to pay the state and federal governments and shellfishermen for the cleanup and damages to natural resources. The World Prodigy spilled 290,000 gallons of number 2 heating oil, compared to the North Cape's estimated 828,000-gallon loss of the same fuel.

The cost of the North Cape cleanup so far has been a private issue between the main cleanup contractor, Donjon Environmental Marine Services, of Hillside, N.J., and Eklof Marine, which ostensibly has $510 million in insurance. If the cost exceeds Eklof Marine's insurance or if Eklof reneges on its agreement to pay, then the Coast Guard said it would become involved and the information would become public.

GOVERNOR ALMOND declared a "state of disaster emergency," and the state on Friday opened a business and social-services assistance center at the Oliver Stedman Government Center in Wakefield to help the estimated 2,000 workers whose livelihoods have been shaken. Included in the help being offered are state and federal loans.

That afternoon, lobstermen and others in the seafood industry were given a status report on the crisis at a briefing in Newport. The fishing ban has been expanded from an area of 150 square miles to 250 square miles -- touching for the first time the coastlines of Jamestown and Aquidneck Island. The U.S. Commerce Department said $600,000 is being sent to the state to help people thrown out of work by the crisis.

The local fishing industry employs 3,000 to 4,000 people, but the impact is spread unevenly. Shellfishermen, who do most of their hunting in Narragansett Bay, have dodged the worst of it. Only 30 to 40 shellfishermen work the now-prohibited ponds year-round. The impact on fin fishermen was not immediately clear. But the estimated 300 to 500 full-time lobstermen have been hit hard.

"It's more serious than the average person realizes," said Robert Smith, president of the Rhode Island Lobstermen's Association. Tens of thousands of lobster pots are stranded in the prohibited zone offshore. Tens of thousands of dead lobsters have washed up, many of them 1 year to 8 years from maturation and harvesting, Smith said. That could threaten the long-range prospects for the 500-boat lobster fleet, he said. In addition, lobstermen already are facing federal limits on their catch -- and resulting financial losses -- because the federal government says their resource is overfished and depleted.

Boat owners will have trouble making loan payments for their vessels due to the spill, Smith said, and crew members already are in dire need of a paycheck. But both groups are ineligible for unemployment compensation because they are classified as self-employed. The longer the crisis lingers, the greater the danger that boat crews will break up and crew members will commit to other employment, Smith said.

January is the offseason for lobstering, which eases the crisis. But Smith pointed out that the lobstermen who work all year count on the higher prices they usually get for their catch in the winter, when the supply of lobster is lower.

"We're beginning to get a little bit nervous," he said. Pressure is building for quick damage settlements with the North Cape's insurer, raising the possibility that lobstermen will mistakenly settle cheap. Smith said they need short-term aid until the extent of damages becomes more clear.

ALSO STUNG is the leader of the state's tiny aquaculture industry, Spatco. Its oyster and scallop farm on the Narragansett side of Point Judith Pond is off-limits because of the oil infiltration.

Spatco owner Robert Rheault, who also does business as Moonstone Oysters, sounds anxious but patient. "The product will still be there when the ban is lifted," said Rheault, who usually ships 4,000 whole oysters every week and, in season, a like number of scallops. Because the oysters are hibernating now, they take in less water than they do in summer, and presumably less contamination, he said. The contamination will be purged in a month or two, he predicted.

"Hopefully the collective memory of the public will be as short as MTV would have us believe," said Rheault.

THE STATE wants to recoup "opportunity costs" as well as real costs in making damage claims for the disaster, Valois said. "We will make the strongest case possible" for those missed opportunities for new business and sales revenue, he said.

At the same time, confident that a beautiful seashore remains the Ocean State's jewel, officials are working to polish a tarnished image.

The code name for the state's tourism crisis plan is "The Coast is Clear," which was the advertising slogan used after the World Prodigy incident. No new slogan has been picked, said David DePetrillo, state tourism director, but the state called in its advertising agency and is hurriedly reworking its tourism promotion plans to protect 25,000 tourism-related jobs.

The state has a tourism advertising budget of $750,000, which officials consider insufficient because of the emergency. So Giles said it will be augmented with money expected to be raised from federal aid and through claims against Eklof Marine's insurance.

If the state does nothing extra, then business definitely will be hurt, DePetrillo said.

"We can't waste any time in counteracting the misperceptions" that Rhode Island is not fit to visit, he said.