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What Happens When You Move Oil in Boats and Barges…

...instead of in pipelines, the way the Good Lord intended.

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  July 24th, 2008 at 09:05 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Eliot Kamenitz / The Times-Picayune

The catastrophic spill occurred early Wednesday after a 600-foot Liberian-flagged tanker named The Tintomara collided with a barge being pulled by a tugboat near the Harvey Locks. The barge — which was carrying 400,000 gallons of thick, tar-like No. 6 fuel oil — was split in half, sending its contents into the river.

As a result, the Mississippi River is shut down to boat traffic for the entire 100-mile stretch from the busy Port of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico.

This event will get twisted in the minds of some as a reason we don’t want more offshore oil drilling. Offshore oil is moved in pipelines, not tankers and barges. The risk of a accident, and the consequences of the resulting spill, is several orders of magnitude higher when we have to move the stuff in vessels.

Offshore oil easier to regulate and control than the international maritime business. America will be cleaner, safer and more secure when we develop our own oil resources.

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  • Achance

    Inland/Western Rivers/Towing rules to get my USCG Master’s license. I’m amazed that any vessel gets up and down the Mississippi River intact! The rules are just different enough that if you aren’t “one of the boys” you’re going to screw up. Shows how much power the tug and barge guys on the rivers have though, the whole world other than them on the same set of nav rules and they had the power to force all the World’s shipping to follow their rules on the rivers.

  • Vladimir

    …in the state is the Mississippi River Pilots Assn.

    Being a river pilot is a very lucrative position, one that you virtually have to be born into.

  • Achance

    is the same as any licensed mariners’ except that to be a “pilot” you have to have time on the bridge on that route. You only get that by invitation!

    Same here; every vessel over 1600 tons has to have a pilot in SE Alaska waters and the only way to become a pilot is sea time on the routes, which you only get by invitation. I only have a 25 ton Master’s license, but I have a 100 ton Mate’s endorsement, so if I wanted to start working my way up, I could essentially work for free for anybody who’d sign me on so I could get sea time in ever larger vessels to bulk up my Master’s license for near-coastal and inland. Then I could take some more tests for an ocean endorsement then go through the same process to get up to unlimited tonnage ocean master. Then, IF I got invited, I could get some logged route time and get pilotage. The whole scheme is just an artificial bar to entry to keep the price of the ticket as high as possible. I used to think it was terrible, but now that I have a ticket, I’d just as soon nobody else ever got one!

    The irony is that I could sit at this computer with a copy of the Coast Pilot and program the route to any point on the WA/BC/Alaska coast, put the card in the chartplotter on my boat and it would tell the autopilot the course to steer far more accurately than any human could steer it. If I had fuel injected engines, I could even program in the speed to maintain. That can be done with only about $2K worth of equipment. All I’d have to do is maintain a watch. All those ships that have to pay the exorbitant pilotage rates have much more sophisticated navigational suites.