By Bill Symes, IOSA volunteer, and Elaina Thompson, director of IOSA

The San Juan Islands’ miles of beautiful shoreline are amongst their greatest attractions to residents and visitors alike, but also one of their greatest vulnerabilities. With ever-increasing traffic of both pleasure boats and commercial vessels in the Salish Sea, the danger of oil pollution is ever-present. Puget Sound hosts an extensive salvage industry that is well-equipped to mitigate oil spills, but getting the equipment and people to the Islands takes time – time in which a spill can morph from minor and manageable to a major challenge, with much damage already done. The islands are on their own for the first few critical hours after a marine oil spill.

Forty years ago, a group of islanders recognized the need for self-help by forming the Islands’ Oil Spill Association to provide what industry cannot: rapid site assessment and initial response to marine oil spills in local waters. With a small professional staff, trained volunteers and spill mitigation equipment cached in strategic locations, IOSA fills the gap within the first critical 24 hours of an incident in San Juan County. For minor or unknown sheens, IOSA’s only role may be feeding the immediate critical information to federal and state authorities to prevent resources from being deployed when unnecessary. For larger incidents, IOSA feeds critical information and, when directed, begins initial mitigation measures until agency and industry resources can arrive on scene to take over.

Just over a year ago, a dramatic vessel sinking in West Sound on Orcas Island highlighted IOSA’s rapid response capability.

Saturday, Nov. 18, 2023, was pleasant, calm and partly sunny. At West Sound Marina, boat owners and guests enjoyed the fine weather and the opportunity to “mess about in boats.” At about 11 a.m., however, this bucolic scene was rudely interrupted: a boat was sinking! And not just any boat, but El Capitan, an 80-foot-long steel tug and one of the largest and heaviest vessels in the marina. After a few moments of frantic effort, with marina staff taking an axe to mooring lines 2 inches thick to avoid having the tug take the dock with it, El Capitan settled to the bottom of West Sound, in roughly 35 feet of water, just off the end of A dock. Only the top of its radio mast was visible.

El Capitan was built in 1944 for the U.S. Army. It was subsequently used in the Alaskan timber industry, brought to the San Juan Islands as a pleasure craft and berthed at West Sound Marina until it was eventually abandoned. In late 2020, the Marina called in the San Juan County Derelict Vessel Program to help remove the vessel. It secured funding from the State Department of Natural Resources for emergency services to temporarily stabilize the vessel from sinking and remove 750 gallons of diesel oil from the boat’s main fuel tanks and other potential pollution sources. Although most of the pollution threat was removed during this process, the tug’s 12-cylinder main engine (with cylinders the size of dinner plates), three diesel gensets, hydraulic equipment and aging exhaust components inevitably retained significant amounts of petroleum products, leaving the local environment still at risk for pollution. Efforts to remove the vessel continued, but in late 2023, El Capitan’s time ran out.

As the vessel submerged on Nov. 18, 2023, oil rose to the surface and began spreading through the surrounding waters, threatening contamination of boats, structures, the shoreline and wildlife. Marina staff notified the U.S. Coast Guard of the sinking and risk of pollution through the National Response Center, which alerted the San Juan County Department of Emergency Management, who in turn notified Elaina Thompson, executive director of IOSA.

Following Thompson’s texts, a crew of IOSA Tier One (response-trained) volunteers quickly assembled on site, with the most experienced volunteer, Becky Hawley (a 20-year-plus veteran responder with IOSA), acting as operations lead.

The standard technique for preventing the spread of floating oil is to surround it with floating barriers called containment boom. Containment boom is secured by anchor systems in 50- to 100-foot sections that can be bridled to a dock or free-floating in water. Once the floating oil is contained, sorbent materials designed to pick up petroleum products without absorbing water are used to mop up the oil on the surface. IOSA maintains 14 enclosed trailers housing containment boom, anchor systems, sorbent materials and other response supplies within San Juan County. Marina staff helped IOSA volunteers back trailer #16 from the Eastsound Fire Station onto the wharf, where several volunteers started moving the awkward, 100-foot-long sections of containment boom from the wharf to the seaplane dock for immediate deployment.

At that point, the boom sections needed to be towed into place, hooked together to form a roughly pentagonal “corral” for the oil surfacing from the tug, the corners anchored to the sea bottom.

IOSA trailers provide the necessary anchors and rode to accomplish this setup, along with light buoys to warn vessels away from the boom at night. An IOSA Tier One volunteer (and retired USCG veteran) boarded one of the boats to help Hawley in the marina skiff direct boom siting and anchoring. Meanwhile, other IOSA Tier One volunteers and marina staff deployed sorbent materials in key positions around the marina.

As dusk began to settle around West Sound, 500 feet of orange IOSA containment boom lined with sorbents now encircled the large tug resting on the bottom. The Washington State Department of Ecology workers were now on scene, collaborating with IOSA to adjust the final components of the containment, and all involved seemed to sigh with a bit of satisfaction, concern and exhaustion all mixed into one collective breath.

For the next few weeks, Thompson coordinated with the USCG, DOE, West Sound Marina and IOSA volunteers to continually monitor the oil leaking from the wreck and its containment. Downwind from the marina is the mouth of Crow Creek, a potential spawning ground and gathering area for waterfowl. Volunteers monitored the surface oil appearing in that area for recoverability and wildlife contamination (none was ever found). Marina staff took over the responsibility of maintaining the boom and sorbents, re-anchoring the boom when storms blew it out of place and changing the sorbents when necessary. Oil continued to “burp” from the wreck until the day it was pulled from the water, though more slowly as time went on.

The final step was removal, a multimillion-dollar process of lifting, transport and disposal. El Capitan was an abandoned vessel when it sank, and the lack of an identifiable legal owner complicated negotiations between USCG, several County and state departments, the Marina and its insurer. After months of negotiations and discussions, an agreement was reached, contracts were let and equipment was moved into place. On June 19, seven months after the sinking, a sizable crowd watched as a colossal crane raised El Capitan and deposited the hulk on a barge for its final voyage to the breakers.

As an oil spill, this incident was minor, largely thanks to the earlier action of the West Sound Marina, the SJC DV Program, and the state DNR to empty El Capitan’s main fuel tanks. IOSA was able to fulfill its first-responder role by providing initial response and containment with the help of marina staff and a few key community volunteers. Its Tier One volunteer training program paid off: the volunteers did what was required competently, quickly and, most importantly, safely. IOSA contributed to the resolution of El Capitan’s wreck in exactly the way its charter intends.

Islands’ Oil Spill Association is a one-of-a-kind spill response organization in the San Juan Islands, and one of very few nonprofit, community-based, spill response organizations in the nation. For more information, visit http://iosaonline.org. If you see oil in the water, report it to Washington state at 800-OILS-911 or the USCG National Response Center at 800-424-8802. Both of these reporting agencies call on IOSA to respond within San Juan County.

The authors would like to thank Betsy Wareham, Mary Gropp, Brendan Cowan, Becky Hawley, Marta Green and Kari Koski for their assistance in compiling this report.

Contributed photo.

Contributed photo.

Contributed photo.