BARGE AGROUND
None of vessel’s gasoline cargo spills, but environmental groups sound alarm
A barge carrying about 2.5 million gallons of gasoline didn’t spill any of its cargo when it ran aground early Tuesday near the west shore of the Hudson River in Greene County, but the incident quickly became fuel for environmental groups fighting a proposal that would allow large vessels carrying crude to anchor at 10 locations on the river.
A barge called the RTC 150 ran aground on the “shallow, sandy river bottom” near Catskill about 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, according to state Department of Environmental Conservation spokesman Sean Mahar.
Reinauer Transportation Co., the Staten Island firm that owns the barge, didn’t cite a cause for the accident but noted in a statement to the press that it happened “in foggy weather.”
The U.S. Coast Guard said the barge was being pushed northbound by the tug Meredith Reinauer when the accident happened.
The Coast Guard, the state environmental department and Reinauer Transportation all said there was no leak of gasoline and no breach of the barge’s hull as a result of the accident, which drew Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Environmental Commis-
sioner Basil Seggos to the scene Tuesday afternoon.
State pollution response teams were investigating the accident nevertheless.
The Coast Guard and Reinauer said there were no injuries among crew members.
Reinauer did not identify any of the people aboard the barge or the tug but said: “The captain and crew of the Meredith Reinauer are a highly experienced, highly vetted, professional crew.”
Also, Reinauer said, “as soon as we learned of the incident, we informed the proper authorities, including
the U.S. Coast Guard and New York Spill Response Department. We are fully cooperating with their investigation.”
Reinauer said one of its other tugs, the Craig Eric Reinauer, was sent to help transfer the 60,000 barrels of gasoline from the RTC 150 to the another barge, the RTC 103.
Mahar said environmental officials were working in conjunction with the Coast Guard to determine what steps would be taken to free the barge that ran aground.
The Coast Guard said other vessels on the river were informed of the accident and that a safety zone was established around the grounded barge.
Cuomo said he ordered
an investigation of the incident and what might have caused it.
“The Hudson River is a critical piece of the Empire State, both environmentally and economically, and we are launching a full-scale response to ensure this incident does not threaten it,” the governor said in a prepared statement after viewing the stuck barge.
U.S. Rep. John Faso, in whose district the accident occurred, said in a prepared statement that he was “relieved to see that there were no major injuries or spillage resulting from today’s incident.”
Faso, R-Kinderhook, said he planned to ask for a formal investigation by the Coast Guard and, if circumstances
warrant, the Office of Marine Safety at the National Transportation Safety Board.
Two prominent environmental groups in the region, Poughkeepsie-based Scenic Hudson and Westchester County-based Riverkeeper, used Tuesday’s accident to reiterate their case against a proposal being considered by the Coast Guard that would allow a total of up to 43 large vessels filled with Bakken crude to anchor at 10 locations on the Hudson River between Yonkers and Kingston.
“This incident underscores the serious threat posed by the transport of crude oil and other hazardous materials through the Hudson Valley,” Scenic Hudson
President Ned Sullivan said in a prepared statement. “Fortunately, no gasoline was spilled, but the next time we may not be so lucky. Establishing dozens of new locations for these barges to anchor in the Hudson would only increase the risks of groundings, collisions and spills ... that could pose serious risks to local water supplies and irreplaceable aquatic habitats.”
John Lipscomb, a patrol boat captain for Riverkeeper, said in a prepared statement that the barge accident, though not resulting in a spill, “is another example of how accidents happen, even with our highly qualified tugboat crews and sophisticated, state-of-the-art navigation equipment.”
“We don’t want that increased transport of Bakken oil on the Hudson, precisely because accidents happen, and crude oil, poisonous to the life in the river, cannot be recovered from a moving body of water like the Hudson,” he wrote.
Lipscomb said gasoline on water will spread out and eventually vaporize, but crude won’t.
And he went further on Tuesday than merely repeating his group’s call for the anchorage proposal to be rejected.
“The movement of Bakken crude oil on the Hudson should be banned, because it can’t be recovered or cleaned up, as demonstrated in numerous spills across the continent,” Lipscomb wrote.