Ship Channel remains closed after oil spill Meanwhile, oil washes up on Galveston beaches

The Robert C. Lanier ferry boat resumes its duties between Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula on Tuesday morning. The Robert C. Lanier ferry boat resumes its duties between Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula on Tuesday morning. Photo: Cody Duty, Houston Chronicle Photo: Cody Duty, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 129 Caption Close Ship Channel remains closed after oil spill 1 / 129 Back to Gallery

GALVESTON — The Houston Ship Channel, where up to 168,000 gallons of oil were spilled after a barge and a tanker collided last weekend, will remain closed until Tuesday, Coast Guard officials said late Monday.

Officials said they will evaluate on Tuesday whether to open the channel.

Oil washed up on tourist beaches in Galveston Monday, two days after the collision, an official said.

The oil on Galveston beaches was in the form of tar balls, relatively easy to clean up, primarily on the east end of Galveston Island, said Charlie Kelly, Galveston's emergency management coordinator.

The ferry between Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula, closed since the spill, is expected to reopen at 7 a.m. Tuesday, officials said. For now, services will be limited to between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

A total of 81 vessels waited Monday to move through the channel as authorities continued efforts to contain and recover oil.

As of 6 a.m. Monday, the command said in a statement, 43 outbound vessels and 38 inbound vessels were waiting for the channel to be reopened.

On Sunday, salvage vessels finished pumping about 750,000 gallons of heavy marine fuel oil from a partially sunken barge that leaked thousands of gallons of thick, oozing sludge into Galveston Bay after a collision with a tanker.

Oil from the damaged barge spread as far 12 miles into Galveston Bay as wind and choppy water made containing the spill impossible, U.S. Coast Guard officials said.

Vessels spent the day skimming oil, and 69,000 feet of containment boom had been used to limit the oil's spread.

But changing current, winds and weather conditions forced officials to extend containment and recovery plans farther into the Gulf of Mexico and south along Galveston Island.

"This is devastating," said James Stork, 46, a Galveston native who owns a medical staffing company. "I think cleanup is going to be a lot more than they expected. It's really going to affect the economy for people who depend on fishing and shrimping."

Experts said it is too soon to say how extensive the environmental and economic damage will be. But fishermen said they were already throwing back oil-covered catches.

'It's horrible'

Jeff and Patience Curley drove to Galveston from Dallas for a cruise on Carnival Magic to Jamaica and Cozumel. They arrived early and decided to check out the spill about noon.

As they walked the beach, they saw crews laying out stretches of bright boom in the water. Their cruise, scheduled to depart at 4 p.m., was delayed. Later in the day, the orange booms had been almost entirely blackened by oil and pushed to the shoreline, they said.

"It's horrible," said Jeff Curley, 50.

Josh Fundling, 41, a Galveston native, shook his head in anger. "This stuff should have never made it to the beach," he said. "Those booms are supposed to keep it in the water. You're already seeing dead birds. Give it a couple days and you're going to see dead fish."

Throughout the day, volunteers photographed dead or imperiled sludge-covered sea gulls, sanderlings and other birds at important roosting sites on the Bolivar Peninsula and on Galveston Island even as government officials struggled to decide where to deploy volunteers and workers to attempt to help oiled birds.

A layer of sticky black tar already has lined the beaches on the bay side of the Texas City dike, a popular fishing area where a bevy of tugboats could be seen surrounding the sunken barge.

East of the dike, at another popular fishing spot at Galveston Island's east end, a pair of men fishing lamented the spill. "When I first got here, I knew something was wrong," said Mohamed Chetouani, 38, of northwest Houston, pointing to the oil along the shore.

"This is the only coast we have," said Farid Saffi, 34, his friend and fellow fisherman. "Where are we going to go now?"

String of accidents

The oil spilled into Galveston Bay around 12:35 p.m. Saturday after the barge collided with the tanker, a Liberian-flagged bulk vessel named Summer Wind.

The barge was carrying 924,000 gallons of RMG 380, a special bunker fuel oil often used in shipping that doesn't evaporate easily and could not be attacked with the same kinds of dispersants used in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, experts said.

The towboat involved in the spill, the M/V Miss Susan, was pushing two barges en route to the Bolivar peninsula from Texas City when the accident occurred in heavy fog, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

Government records show the Miss Susan has been involved in a string of 20 accidents and incidents reported to the Coast Guard in the past dozen years, including two other accidents that occurred when the boat was pushing barges containing oil or asphalt.

The barges and the Miss Susan are owned by Houston-based Kirby Inland Marine, which has one of the nation's largest fleets of barges and is heavily involved in oil transport nationwide, according to company and government information.

The Coast Guard has not identified the captains of either vessel involved in the accident. Nor do older government records available online indicate who was involved in other accidents involving the Miss Susan.

The oil in the barge involved in the spill was held in separate compartments. The damaged compartment contained 4,000 barrels, or 168,000 gallons, the Coast Guard said.

Generally, the toxicity of RMG 380 is considered relatively low, but it is persistent - it can remain essentially unchanged in water or along a shoreline even as months and years pass. Canada's environmental agency has described it as "difficult to clean up," and research conducted for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concludes that "close to zero" of the heavy fuel can be chemically dispersed.

The heavy marine fuel that was spilled, also referred to as IFO 380, is a particularly viscous bunker fuel that does not evaporate well and defies traditional chemical dispersants, which were used in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. According to material safety data sheets, the biggest concern about the fuel is its high hydrogen sulfide content, though that could weather off quickly - a benefit to first responders aboard skimming vessels trying to suck up the oil.

A former oil spill consultant describes RMG 380 as similar to Bunker C, a "bottom of the barrel" fuel used for ocean-going ships. Because it is very heavy, there's a possibility that as it is exposed to the elements, it could become slightly more dense than water, potentially slipping below the reach of standard skimming and detection techniques.

Coast Guard Capt. Brian Penoyer, captain of the port, said heavy winds and rough weather had broken the oil slick into patches, some of it thick and easy to skim from the surface and in other places a sheen. "The weather doesn't favor us this time of year," Penoyer said.

First responders in Houston have not had to deal with RMG 380 since March 1996, when the hull of a tank barge being towed through the Houston Ship Channel ruptured, spilling about 126,000 gallons.

Defied skimmers

Heavy winds and bad weather meant that more than half of the spilled fuel was swept into the Gulf of Mexico, where even after three days it defied skimmers. Ultimately, responders fighting to keep the fuel from reaching the shoreline tapped shrimp boats, which used nets to pick up small clumped tar mats and tar patties partially submerged in the water.

Chemical dispersants, like those used to break up the crude flowing out of BP's failed Macondo well in 2010, are not as effective against the heavy marine fuel - and they generally aren't approved for inland waters anyway or shallow territory like Galveston Bay.

When scientists in the United Kingdom tested a widely used dispersant, Corexit 9500, on RMG 380 that had spilled into the sea in 2003, they found it broke up only moderately, and in some cases not at all.

Researchers working at a U.S. government spill lab largely duplicated those results two years later. "IFO 380 showed limited dispersion (in the lab) as seen at sea," the U.S. scientists concluded.

While chemical dispersants are largely ineffective against the marine fuel, responders could burn it off, as long as they pooled enough of it together with booms and other equipment. But the burning of the fuel is not likely close to land.

Debbie Patton, division chief for emergency responses to oil and chemical spills for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said she believed the spill would have more impact on birds and other species that have contact with the water's surface.

"This type of oil is not the kind that tends to have much dissolution into the water column, which is a good thing if you're fish," she said. "It's heavy and sticky and stays on the surface. That's a bad thing if you're a bird or any species that comes up through the surfaces like dolphins or turtles."

The environmental response was slowed by concerns about fumes generated by the spill, as well as problems with equipment. But that's "the nature of the beast," Patton said, when it comes to oil spills.

"It is just the chaos. Nobody knows all the pieces, really. I don't," she said. "Everybody's trying to get their own operations going."

Snowball effect

At Katie's Seafood Market, near Pier 19 in Galveston, William Reichenbach had been told by his bosses not to take any new stock from fisherman because of potential contamination. A fellow employee, Samuel Merchant, said he worried about the snowball effect on local businesses that rely on the fishing and shrimping industry.

"You hope for the best," he said, "but expect the worst."

Kiah Collier, Jennifer Dlouhy, Jayme Fraser, Erin Mulvaney and the Associated Press contributed to this report.