Hazardous Inlet Makes Fuel Oil Delivery Perilous

THE East Rockaway Inlet is the churning, dog-legged entry point from the Atlantic to Reynolds Channel, which hooks up with another channel to a fuel-oil terminal in Oceanside, N.Y. In some places the inlet is only 12 feet deep, yet a 281-foot-long tanker must navigate it to deliver fuel oil to the Sprague Energy terminal.

It is a hazardous place, marine officials say, and it came perilously close to being the site of a major oil spill last month, the region’s highest-ranking Coast Guard official said last week.

The Kristin Poling, a tanker carrying 672,000 gallons of heating oil and diesel fuel, ran aground in the inlet early Nov. 17. The single-hulled tanker was headed to the terminal in Oceanside when it struck a sand shoal in the inlet, which is at the Reynolds Channel entrance.

It was not freed from its wave-battered position, about 450 yards from shore, until high tide just after midnight on Nov. 19 in deteriorating weather. The emergency refloating effort involved a 70-member interagency group including the Coast Guard. Peter J. Boynton, the captain of the Port for Long Island Sound, said a spill might have been averted only because of the group’s extraordinary efforts. That included using 20 tugboats and work boats and offloading nearly 300,000 gallons of fuel oil onto a barge.

The inlet, even after routine dredging, is subject to shoaling, currents, waves and swells that make it particularly difficult to navigate, Captain Boynton said, and the Kristin Poling has run aground in the inlet before, in December 2004.

Captain Boynton said the risks in the inlet were compounded by shoaling patterns that compelled vessels to make a difficult turn he described as a “hook shot” at the Reynolds Channel entrance. He said that a Coast Guard investigation into the grounding continued, but that “certainly at a minimum, the hazardous nature of the channel and the inlet is at least part of the blame.”

The tanker, owned by Poling & Cutler, of Freehold, N.J., is the largest vessel using the channel. Gary Cutler, an owner, said the company was considering dropping the route because it is too hazardous. “We’re reassessing the risk levels,” he said.

In the 2004 incident, which occurred just before the Army Corps of Engineers was to dredge the nearly mile-long federal navigation channel running through the inlet, the Kristin Poling was carrying 756,000 gallons of heating oil to the energy terminal. Captain Boynton said he then imposed a restriction that increased the required clearance between vessel keels and the channel bottom, compelling the Kristin Poling to carry lighter loads.

After urging from Senator Charles E. Schumer to move quickly, the corps is to begin dredging the federal channel by late this month, an official in the corps’ New York district office said. It is normally dredged about every two years.

John Tavolaro, the chief of the operations support branch in the New York office, said the dredging had to be completed within 45 days and provide a channel 14 feet deep and at least 150 feet wide. The corps and the Coast Guard are considering more frequent dredging and depth readings and possible realignment of the channel.

Sprague Energy, the last of several terminals that once operated in an area served by the channel that was known as Oil City, supplies about 60 home-heating oil companies with about 50,000 customers in southern and central Nassau County, said Stephen J. Levy, the company business development director.

Mr. Levy said there were no plans to close the Oceanside operation, which is being serviced temporarily by truck. But, he added, “If the Army Corps is not going to continuously dredge that channel, we may have to look at other options.”

Jeffrey Fullmer, the director of the Long Island South Shore Estuary Reserve in Freeport, said an oil spill in the channel would be especially damaging.

“The current moves very quickly there, and an oil spill on the incoming tide would spread oil into the estuary and the tidal marshes,” he said. “Recovery and cleanup would be very, very difficult.”

By JOHN RATHERNY TIMES
December 17, 2006