In Alaska: An Oil Tanker Sails

By James Willwerth

At night from the summit overlooking the harbor, there is a stunning view of cold, moonlit mountains bending down to a deep bowl of dark water: Valdez Harbor, Alaska, the end of the endlessly fought-over trans-Alaska pipeline. Far below sits a cluster of saucer-shaped storage tanks. Pairs of fat aluminum pipes stretch toward shipping berths 500 yds. out from shore at the tip of long, brightly lit piers. At one berth, the black shape of a tanker lies like a beached whale being fed intravenously. The tanker is hooked to four hydraulically powered feeder lines. All night long it will suck crude oil out of these cold mountains for the lamps and fires and engines of America.

The ship is named the S.S. Arco Anchorage, and it leaves at dawn for Long Beach, Calif., carrying 120,000 tons of oil. Outside the harbor's "narrows," a glitter of orange lights signals the impatience of the 800-ft.-long, 71,500-ton Exxon New Orleans, waiting its turn at the spigot. Though they are less than half as big as the Ultra-Large Carriers (ULCCS), both ships are leviathans of 20th century technology: supersized carriers of an increasingly scarce resource. They are also dinosaurs. When the oil is gone, or is replaced as an energy source, these tankers will follow it into history's technological dustbin. Thereafter, nothing to be carried between continents in the foreseeable future seems likely to require supertankers.

Daylight breaks early this time of year. Shortly after 3 a.m., wintry light quickly overtakes the fishing village of Valdez. On Good Friday of 1964, an 8.4-scale earthquake killed 31 people and forced the town to relocate. Then came a cultural and economic upheaval caused by the pipeline. Nearly 4,000 construction workers and $150-per-hour prostitutes swiftly turned Valdez into a rollicking boomtown. Life is calmer now. The construction workers have left, and the tanker trade has created lucrative permanent jobs. Valdez has a modern high school to show for its troubles and a small, gleaming new hospital to serve its 4,500 inhabitants. Doubtless in response to environmentalists' protest, the eight-member consortium that runs the terminal takes great care to maintain a freshly scrubbed, spill-conscious image. Sea lions play in the water alongside the piers, salmon and herring run in season, and 24-hour emergency crews stand by to contain spills with floating booms, chemicals and scooping devices. Since tankers began arriving last year, about 20 bbl. of oil have been spilled. Two hundred fifty million bbl. have been shipped out. Still, nature and technology do collide here. No one questions that.

As daylight spreads through the harbor's amphitheater, Captain Tom DeTemple, 62, the flinty master of Anchorage, is fretting to be gone. Her chief mate, Harvey Portz, 28, is wrestling with a trimming problem. "She starts to list a little, I pinch down on it," he says in an amiable nasal twang, propping his boots on a big console overgrown with gauges and dials in the ship's cargo-control room. "She's trim by the stern now, but I'll have the draft more forward when we leave. Out to sea, I'll pull in the ballast, and she'll be flat." Translation: Portz is monitoring the 106,000-bbl.-per-hour rush of crude oil into 13 separate storage tanks, some big enough for full-court basketball. The ship must settle on an even keel, yet the tanks cannot be filled simultaneously because it could lead to spills. Portz has to route, or "pinch," the flow back and forth to maintain a rough equilibrium. "Right now you've got to avoid having everything top off at once," he concludes in mixed landlubber jargon. "It's like filling a lot of bathtubs. You have to keep them from running over."

As the 7 a.m. departure approaches, 33 crew members on deck and below are beginning their duties. The surprisingly clean engine room, below and aft, is bigger than the devil's furnace in a fevered imagination. Ship's engineers are checking giant boilers and huge cooling systems that support the 23,500-h.p. turning of a 64-ton propeller. In the galley, blonde, green-eyed Karen Honold, 20, an assistant cook who looks like a movie starlet and makes $906 a month (not counting overtime), is baking a chocolate cake. On the bridge, Captain DeTemple is stalking about in conventional irritation at having to share his command with Harbor Pilot Jim Hurd, the curly-headed Alaskan in charge of maneuvering Anchorage through the narrows. With a tug's help we get under way. Thirty minutes out Hurd calls for a hard left turn, followed by mildly tricky navigation past a needle-shaped island named Middle Rock. The channel is close to a half-mile wide, one of the safest in the world. But even so there is obvious danger as the icy gauntlet of mountains seems to close in around us. "You want to be lined up right," Hurd explains with a smile, "or you get all bent out of shape." Translation: if the helmsman is not careful, the tanker's enormous weight and inertia will make it keep on turning long after it should have straightened out on a new course.

At sea Anchorage's keel rides 52 ft. below the surface like the bottom of a rogue iceberg. Imagine a seven-story office building a block long filled with crude oil, and a sense of the economic and environmental impact of an average supertanker comes clear. A single trip south is worth $11 million to Arco. Refined, this one load could fuel 20,000 cars and heat 6,000 average-size houses for a year. If spilled, it would foul hundreds of miles of coastal beach, kill unbelievable amounts of sea life. Either way, the stakes are high.

When the weather is good, the days at sea are soon as alike as shuffled cards. The ship's engines throb. Work and sleep are punctuated by overstuffed meals, paperback novels and video tapes of old movies, shown in the crew lounge. Each morning half a dozen sleek brown albatrosses cruise behind Anchorage. At a certain place near the bow, the muffled, somehow threatening roar of oil moving in its underwater caves comes to the ear. Always, the ship's bridge is where to be. Nesting several stories above the deck, the size of a Manhattan penthouse, Tom DeTemple's working headquarters is a place of polished wood, shined brass-work, studded with radar and sonar devices, charts, gyroscopes and a coffeepot perking away near a portside window. The vast flat deck stretches out before it like an abstract canvas. Gray pipelines crisscross its surface like giant pencil strokes. Darker intrusions of color are provided by pump terminals, winches and a spare propeller strapped to the deck like a small flying saucer.

But Alaskan sea weather is notoriously perverse: gale winds, huge swells are common south of Valdez, and when they begin, as they always do, the ship's roll can pitch sailors out of beds and chairs. Al Scara, 26, a young maritime-school graduate from New Jersey, instructs me in coping: "You put one side of your mattress against the bulkhead. Your life preserver props up the other. Then you jump in the middle like a hot dog in a roll." On a previous run, a seven-month-old kitten named Scuttlebutt was playing in a doorway when Anchorage rolled heavily and the door slammed like a guillotine, slicing off its tail. The tail has been preserved for observation in a desk drawer.

On the second night, the waves crest to 40 ft. The winds reach 80 m.p.h. In our cabin a rollaway cot gets loose and careens back and forth for hours, giving my cabinmate a severe case of "porcelain worship" -- what the Anchorage crew calls seasickness. The tanker is rocking like a huge cradle. Spray explodes over the deck in big phosphorescent clouds. Each time the ship hits a strong swell head on, a perceptible shudder passes through its hull. And each time sailors at work and play are reminded that tankers do break up. "When you see the bow waving at you," intoned Seaman Frank Kelley, 23, "you worry."

The waters are calmer next day. The crew's TV set is picking up reassuring local news and Johnny Carson's monologues from stations in Oregon and northern California. We reach Long Beach on a sunny, fool's-gold Friday morning six days out of Valdez. On an ebbing tide Anchorage's massive hull clears the harbor entrance by just 15 ft. We are back in the industrial world that requires supertankers: dirty waterways filled with shoulder-to-shoulder freighters and loading docks; land crowded with gasoline pumps, warehouses and waiting trucks. Those icy mountains reflected in the surface of Valdez Harbor seem very far away.

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