Travel Reference
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in downtown Port Arthur. The tanker—nearly as long as the channel was wide—skewed
across the waterway, colliding with a vessel tied up at the wharf and obstructing the path of
an oncoming towboat. The towboat, pushing a pair of 250-foot-long barges, had no choice
but to plow directly into the
Eagle Otome,
ripping open a neat gash in the oil tanker's hull.
In what seems like a great stroke of luck, though, only 2 percent of the tanker's oil spilled
through the opening.
On the other hand, we're talking about 2 percent of more than 23 million gallons of
cargo. It was the largest oil spill Texas had seen in two decades.
As with an oil find, so with an oil spill: for as long as it lasts, it is a source of work. On
Spindletop, that meant on and off for decades. In the case of the
Eagle Otome,
it meant a
little over two weeks. There were cleanup companies to deal with the spilled oil, and tugs
to tow the damaged ships away for repairs. There was the media, trying to puzzle out the
causes of the accident and covering the closure of the channel. A more catastrophic incid-
ent might have sustained them for a month or more. (As for me, it was just dumb luck that
I happened to show up in Port Arthur only a couple of weeks after it happened.)
An oil spill is a boon of sorts even to environmental activists, whether as additional mo-
tivation or as convincing, public proof of an issue's importance. The threat of poisonous hy-
drogen sulfide gas from the spill prompted a short evacuation of downtown Port Arthur—a
fact that had already become another arrow for Hilton Kelley to shoot at the refinery com-
panies.
It might not be the most efficient way to extract value from oil, but the fact remains that
a spill is not only a spill. It's a massive carcass, which we gather around to eat.
At my hotel, the parking lot was crowded with trucks bearing the logos of companies
like Clean Harbors and Oil Mop LLC. I was not the only one who had chosen the Ramada:
the Coast Guard had set up its spill response headquarters in one of the conference rooms.
Khaki-wearing men strode in and out of the lobby with an air of can-do seriousness. At its
height, the cleanup had put something like two thousand people to work, but now things
were winding down, and the mood was almost festive.
“I hear you're leaving us,” said the hotel manager to a passing cleanup contractor.
“Well, maybe we'll be back,” said the contractor.
“For the next oil spill?” called a woman from behind the check-in desk.
