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01/19/97
PART ONE: Spill left scars time can't wash away
By TOM MOONEY
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer
SOUTH KINGSTOWN -- The winter sun is sinking, painting as it goes the pale dune grasses of Moonstone Beach a spectacular tangerine, and stretching Charlie Hebert's shadow long across the sand.
When Hebert, manager of the Trustom Pond National Wildlife Refuge, walked over this berm one year ago today, the scene that greeted him left him nearly sick: a scorched tug washed onto the pristine beach; a grounded barge belching nearly a million gallons of toxic red oil into the surf.
"For the past year, there hasn't been many hours of the day when I haven't thought about it," says Hebert.
But Hebert and the other scientists still studying the spill's environmental damage are a small minority.
For most of us, the disaster that transfixed an entire state has come and gone. Gone like the fleeting ducks that now dart over the waves where the North Cape once lay.
Last week the Journal-Bulletin visited with a half-dozen people whose lives were touched by the spill. They included a lobsterman and a clammer, whose livelihoods were threatened, a Charlestown police officer and a beachgoer, who both felt compelled to act, and a Coast Guard hero.
Even for them the spill seems a distant memory.
But the spill has left a mark in a way Charlie Hebert tries to explain as he walks the cold, deserted beach.
"While I'm pretty sure the environment will recover," he says, "I'm never going to look at the refuge quite the same way again."
The beach, the dunes, the fragile salt ponds behind them, have shown their vulnerability.
AMONG THOSE LAUDED for their work during the spill, Charlestown Police Lt. Raoul Lefebvre was recognized for the best surf cast.
On the morning after the North Cape ran aground, Lefebvre drove to the Charlestown Breachway and discovered that cleanup crews were nowhere to be found.
Lefebvre got on the phone and called the command center at the Dutch Inn in Galilee: "We have a major inland waterway here and no one is down here."
Lefebvre could hear someone on the other end rustling through papers or maps. Then came an expletive. "We'll be there in 15 minutes," the person said.
The crews arrived as promised but then stood on both sides of the breachway stumped as to how to get a boom line across the raging outgoing tide. No one wanted to launch a boat, afraid it would be swept out to sea.
"I'll be right back," Lefebvre told them.
Lefebvre, who spends much of his summers trolling for striped bass and fluke at the mouth of the breachway, raced down Charlestown Beach Road to Breachway Bait and Tackle. He came back with a borrowed 91/2-foot rod spooled with 25-pound test line, and several 4-ounce sinkers. His sinker reached the crew on the breachway's opposite bank on the second try. The boom's line was then tied on to the fishing line and dragged across.
"It just took some Yankee ingenuity," Lefebvre said the other day back at the breachway.
Actually, what it took was one man's love for his salt pond.
"I didn't do that just because I was doing my job," Lefebvre said. "I did it because. . . . I couldn't imagine Charlestown without that pond."
Lefebvre said that despite the spill, the fluke and striper fishing were excellent last summer outside the breachway. However, for the first time anyone could remember, the annual bluecrab festival at the Ocean House Marina had to import crabs.
And Lefebvre worries about another spill.
"It happened and it's over but I just want to know why they allow these things to still happen. These tankers are disasters just waiting to happen."
JUST DOWN the street from Brian Briggs's rented cottage, ice the color of skim milk has his nine-foot skiff locked in. That and a high tide have him home this morning rather than digging for steamer clams along the edge of Point Judith Pond.
At least it's not oil that's keeping him home.
Last year at this time Briggs, his wife, Gail, and their toddler, Brian Jr., faced an uncertain future as North Cape oil seeped into the pond, poisoning the only livelihood Briggs had known for a decade.
Today, Briggs, 36, is back clamming in Point Judith Pond. And like the sheen that once covered many of the pond's coves, talk of the spill has long since dissipated.
"I think a lot of people have forgotten all about it," he says. "Everybody is back to normal."
Even Briggs's digging partner, who for months after the pond reopened to shellfishing, in April, worried that the clams tasted of oil, has fallen silent, says Briggs.
"It was a psychological thing with him."
The spill's timing could not have been worse for the Briggs family. Winter is a lean time for shellfishermen. And a month before the spill their son , then 22 months, had suffered violent "fever seizure" ending up in Children's Hospital in Boston. He recovered, but Gail had to quit her job as a Cumberland Farms clerk to care for him. Heating and car payment bills stacked up -- including one for $16,000 from the hospital.
"Just getting by was pretty hard," says Brian. "We had no money."
Desperate, the Briggses showed up at a Peace Dale food bank.
Says Gail, "If we didn't get AFDC (Aid for Families with Dependent Children) we would have been on the street."
The family settled with the barge's insurance company for what Brian will only say was a "fair, nothing more" claim for damages. And life returned to normal.
Throughout the summer, Briggs says he would occasionally dig up small sheens of oil he attributed to the North Cape. And the price for local clams was off 40 cents per pound from the previous year. But clams seem as abundant as before.
"I thought it would be much more devastating."
Life is still lean as a clammer, Briggs says, especially this time of year with the clams deeper, the competition fierce, the weather cold.
But at least there's no oil.
THE COAST GUARD station sits as the nail on the finger of Point Judith with water on three sides. But Adam Cravey can't see the tug and oil barge steaming by Narragansett Bay if he wanted to.
He's stationed today in the radio room which has one window, facing west. The tug and barge are far to the east, their movement imperceptible until a fishing boat in the foreground becomes a calibration stick.
Told what's out there, Cravey shrugs. They're out there all the time. No, he says, they don't remind him of what happened.
"It's nothing I dwell on, really," says Cravey, who was three days shy of his 22nd birthday last Jan. 19 when he jumped into the numbing cold of Rhode Island Sound to save five crew members of the burning tug Scandia.
"Sometimes when I see something on TV about it I get kind of excited, knowing I had something to do with that, but that's it. I've just gone on with the rest of my life. I know that sounds corny."
Cravey was upstairs cleaning his bunk room when the distress call came in that Friday afternoon last January. He and the rest of a rescue crew raced the three miles to their cutter in Galilee and within minutes where smashing through 20-foot waves.
Cravey, who followed his father's footsteps into the Coast Guard, had never seen anything so wild. The trip out, "to be honest, was kind of fun," says Cravey, who on days off rides snowboards down steep mountains -- and sports a split lip to prove it.
Then the burning Scandia emerged through the fog. Cravey says he didn't so much volunteer to go over the side as he fell victim to his training. He knew where the swim fins and rescue harness were and put them on. When the Scandia crew abandoned ship, he went in, too.
The tug crew all wore thick "survival suits," protecting them from the icy water. Cravey did not. Immediately the stinging cold water enveloped him. Still, he swam a line around the Scandia crew. All were pulled aboard with Cravey suffering from hypothermia.
On those infrequent occasions now when he does think about that day, what he remembers most vividly "are all my friends pulling me out of the water when I was freezing."
The same friends who still harass him during interviews.
"Adam, can I have your autograph?" says one, poking his head into the radio room.
Blushing, Cravey says, "See what I mean?"
And so for Adam Cravey life long ago returned to the more mundane rituals of Coast Guard life: morning boat inspections, training new arrivals, radio duty.
At his request he's being transferred next month to the West Coast for paramedic training, the next step of what he hopes will be a long career.
But Cravey says "I'm done with jumping in the water and stuff like that."
That's what he says.
A MONTH AFTER the spill, Frank Blount walked into a bank to see about a loan to buy the Galilee restaurant adjacent to his charter fishing business.
There behind a desk sat the loan officer reading in the newspaper how Blount's fishing business was down 80 percent because of the spill.
Blount had some explaining to do. But he walked away with the loan -- and eventually away from the North Cape spill, too.
"Last winter there was no business," Blount said the other day, taking a break from some engine work on one of his party fishing boats. He figures the spill cost him about $150,000, which he expected to recover through the barge's insurance company.
"So far this year, though, the winter's been good. I've got no complaints."
In winter, Blount fishes for cod. Zealous anglers in need of wetting a line will travel from as far away as New York to spend a few hours bobbing in Rhode Island Sound or two days out on Georges Bank, 100 miles offshore.
Blount said his business last winter suffered largely from perception. People heard about the spill and assumed it affected fishing far outside an area of some 250-square miles closed in Rhode Island Sound.
That perception continued long after fishing restrictions in the closed area were lifted.
"We had people in May and June who were still canceling their off-shore trips," Blount said. "It really wasn't until August when we got back to normal."
Ironically, the summer fluke and scup fishing just off Moonstone Beach "was fine," Blount said. "Probably better than the summer before."
And Blount is optimistic about this year.
"A year ago we were done," he said, "but we're sailing again."
ART SMITH PULLS pulls a chart down in the wheelhouse of his lobster boat and traces a finger along the wedge of Block Island Sound where a year ago, 800 of his 1,200 traps lay on the bottom in water ruled unfit to fish in.
Smith waited weeks to retrieve his gear, then months more for the area to reopen to lobstering.
By then, June, "you didn't want to be in there," Smith says. "It wasn't worth your effort."
Smith, 53, ended last year with his business off 35 percent, a loss he attributes to a decimated lobster population.
Smith doesn't know how much more he would have lost if he hadn't moved his traps to areas that weren't closed.
He received a partial settlement from the barge's insurance company. But, like most Rhode Island lobstermen -- the group perhaps hardest hit economically by the spill -- he's waiting for scientists to make a final determination of lobster mortality.
It is an unsettling wait.
"I don't know what the real damage has been. When the spill happened the body count of dead lobsters washing up on the beach was as high as a million -- though I don't know how much truth there is to that -- and how many were dead in the ocean that were never counted?"
Smith isn't sure what the future will hold.
Many of the lobsters washing up on the beach were small, perhaps two or three years away from becoming legal size. "Maybe three years from now we are going to have a real bad year."
The truth is, Smith says, no one knows for sure.
EARLY THAT SATURDAY morning, John Waterman turned on the TV news and saw the damage being wrought by the North Cape.
In the picture's foreground, a common loon crawled through the sand, mired in oil, unable to fly.
"People were just taking pictures of the poor little thing and walking around it," Waterman recalled Friday. "I said to myself `that bird ain't got a prayer.' "
So Waterman, a hunter and fisherman who lives less than a mile from Moonstone Beach, grabbed some towels, donned a warm coat and drove to the beach to save the loon, one of hundreds of birds that turned up injured or dead.
He found the loon in the arms of a woman who had picked it up. He offered to care for it. He took it home, bathed it in the tub, warmed it with an electric heating pad and eventually turned it over to fish and wildlife officials.
Waterman, 49, says he has made few trips back to the beach since then: "I didn't want to."
Too many reminders.
"I did go back a couple of months after they said everything was cleaned up and dug down with a shovel two or three feet. There was still smell [of oil] down there," he says.
During most summers, Waterman traverses the south shore from Deep Hole in Matunuck to the Charlestown Breachway, searching for stripers and bluefish.
"I do a lot of catch and release," he says. "But I didn't even fish down there this summer. I figured anything that is out there now has to be replenishing itself, so the fewer I take the more chances of them coming back."
Waterman says he believes it will take a long time for the environment to heal, for the lobsters and clams to come back. And if there is a lesson from the North Cape spill it is that we learned "how very vulnerable we are. We are lucky we haven't had more spills."
"We have to start watching what we are doing," he says, "or we're not going to have anything left to feel sorry about."
BACK ON MOONSTONE Beach, Charlie Hebert, the refuge manager, says what happened here last winter will most assuredly happen again -- somewhere, sometime in Rhode Island.
"We created these problems ourselves when we moved into the age of oil. We know oil needs to be moved."
And there is no moving backward.
As a broken chain of Canada geese lift up out of the refuge, heading for their night resting place, Herbert says "I would like to never see something like this ever happen again, but I know it will."
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