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9.18.97 07:34:36
North Cape
oil shows
high toxicity
 The North Cape barge carried two kinds of oil, and scientists must revise their damage estimates.
By PETER B. LORD
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer
For more than a year Christopher Reddy, a student at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography, tried to tell people about his surprise discovery concerning the North Cape oil spill.
He talked about it at cocktail parties, described it at a Block Island oil-spill symposium and reported it to other scientists and government officials. No one paid attention.
Finally last week -- after an official at the state Department of Environmental Management spent four months on a ``scientific science project'' corroborating Reddy's work -- a panel of government experts spending millions of dollars reached the same conclusion Reddy had made independently for his doctoral research project:
The North Cape barge was actually carrying two kinds of oil when it ran aground Jan. 19, 1996, on Moonstone Beach: the tea-colored diesel fuel that everyone assumed was its sole cargo, and a second oil -- a home heating oil tinted to a pinkish hue -- that was similar chemically but twice as toxic as the diesel fuel.
The new acknowledgement of a more toxic oil means many of the damage estimates prepared by consultants are wrong and the damage to some marine life was probably more extensive than previously estimated.
The finding could lead to hefty increases in damages paid by the oil company's insurance carriers and a windfall for the state of Rhode Island as it seeks to repair the environmental harm caused by the spill.
The discovery also seriously delayed the damage-assessment process. Conclusions that were to be announced last spring are now postponed until later this fall, at best.
``It was real late in the day when all this was discovered,'' says Claude Cote, a DEM lawyer. ``And in the end, it's a good reminder to everyone that you can't forget the fundamentals. You have to have good data.''
WHY DID IT
take so long to recognize there were two kinds of oil?
Neither the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is playing a significant role in the assessment process, nor Eklof Marine, the company that owns the North Cape, returned calls for comment.
Cote attributed the oversight to the decentralized investigation process. ``Many people had little pieces of the pie, but few had the larger picture.''
Others speculated that experts just didn't realize where Reddy got his oil samples from, or dismissed his work as simply being wrong.
DEM's Stephen Morin, an oil-response expert who spent much of the summer proving the validity of the URI figures, gives Reddy and his teacher, Prof. James G. Quinn, credit for doing the right thing all along and trying to make their results known.
``I can't say enough about them,'' Morin said. ``They just did it. They didn't ask for any money. And they had a dramatic effect on the process.''
Although it's difficult to find any sign of the oil spill now -- 21 months later -- experts say the North Cape was many times more harmful to marine life than the 1989 World Prodigy spill off Newport.
About 290,000 gallons spilled from the World Prodigy, but most of it remained on the surface and evaporated. About 800 dead crabs and lobsters were found afterward.
Nearly three times as much oil spilled from the North Cape barge. The oil was driven deep into the water, where it killed marine life for miles around. Afterward, biologists counted about one million dead lobsters and nearly 400 dead marine birds.
The owners of the World Prodigy eventually paid $567,299 to restore the natural resources their spill damaged. The settlement for North Cape is expected to be vastly greater.
THE WAY
the North Cape settlement is being determined is precedent-setting, because just days before the spill NOAA established a new protocol for such assessments.
In previous spills, lawyers for both sides generally hired experts and often spent years arguing over damages. It took four years to negotiate a settlement for the relatively minor World Prodigy spill.
Under the new NOAA protocol, polluters are required to work cooperatively with federal and local interests to assess spill damage, to recommend cures and to carry them out. Because the North Cape is the first spill under the new rules, it is being watched by oil experts
around the country.
So far, those involved say the process seems to be working. Trustees for state and federal agencies, with approval from Eklof and its insurers, focused their research on four areas: lobsters and clams, sea birds, the salt ponds and the economic losses to recreational fishermen and beach users.
They spent about $2 million hiring scientists and consultants to determine how many marine creatures died and assess the long-term effects. Some, like the lobsters that had washed ashore, they simply counted. Others probably sank out of sight, so the scientists resorted to computer models based in large part on the known toxicity of the oil that spilled.
The oil that spilled comprises thousands of chemical compounds. Some of the compounds are extremely lethal, and that's what the experts focused on.
According to Kenneth Hinga, a URI chemist, the toxicity comes from compounds known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Samples collected from the North Cape barge by NOAA and sent to several labs showed the PAHs comprised about 3 percent of its oil. That figure was used for a number of critical computations.
LAST WINTER,
the trustees predicted they would be making their assessments public in a few months.
But in April, during a conference call among the trustees, a glitch arose.
A NOAA lawyer asked about a footnote in a report that referred to an oil sample that was 7 percent PAH, more than double the accepted figure. The footnote referred to Reddy's work.
Others on the panel discounted the figure, recalls Morin, a trustee. They said they couldn't verify the authenticity of the sample so it should be disregarded.
But Morin later determined the sample was legitimate. It was taken by a Coast Guard officer and delivered to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency laboratory in Narragansett.
Morin soon visited Reddy and Quinn at Quinn's chemistry laboratory. There he heard the story of how just after the spill, Reddy began asking for samples of oil-tainted seawater for his doctoral thesis.
Usually the lab charges a fee to analyze substances, and Reddy didn't even have the proper authorization, because Quinn was away at the time.
But to Reddy, the oil spill was a jackpot -- a perfect case study for his work on the fate of organic compounds spilled in the ocean, and it was in his own backyard. He recruited other students and worked night and day, even through the Super Bowl.
Reddy also obtained a sample of pure oil drawn from inside the barge. It came from the EPA laboratory next to URI, where many of the scientists are former students of Quinn's.
Reddy found a 7 percent PAH level, and when he found that some of the EPA scientists had gotten the same result, he figured that his work was sound.
Months later, he picked up a report from the NOAA assessment team, and saw the 3 percent figure cited.
``I thought, holy . . ., something is wrong here!'' Reddy exclaimed.
Reddy obtained some of NOAA's oil sample and confirmed they were working with a 3 percent PAH figure. That's when he was sure there were two very similar oils with very different toxicity.
But no one listened until Morin showed up at Quinn's lab. Once Morin was convinced there was a second oil, he had to find out how much was in the barge and how much spilled.
Getting answers wasn't easy, Morin says, because there are so many other legal actions related to the spill -- such as lawsuits to recover cleanup costs and loss of fishing time -- that lawyers interceded every time a question was raised.
Morin tracked down reports from salvors who inspected the barge, terminal crews who loaded it, and naval architects who supervised the barge's removal from the beach. Eklof Marine's cargo manifest was not readily available to investigators.
Late in the summer, an official loading document arrived from the Coast Guard. That document showed data on specific gravity -- which reflects the density of a substance -- which indicate that were two different kinds of oil in the barge's 14 compartments.
``It was like, bingo, we got the numbers,'' Morin said.
Although the more toxic oil was loaded in just four compartments, those four were among the eight that ruptured, Morin found. So of the 828,000 gallons that escaped, Morin concludes about half was oil that was 3 percent PAH, and the other half was oil with 6 or 7 percent PAH.
The new figures were being distributed to consultants this week, so they can refine their damage assessments. In a month or so the trustees hope the work will be done and they can finally make public their official conclusions on the North Cape's damages.
THE SPILL IN REVIEW:
Get the whole story, from the day the North Cape grounded to special reports a year later, on projo.com, the Journal-Bulletin's Web site. Now in searchable form, the site also features a bulletin board of reaction, photos, links to related sites worldwide and more. Go to: http://www.projo.com/specials/oilspill/
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