Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
look anywhere else; the thing approaching to port had no end. It spread up and out from the
water, an endless wall of rust-streaked metal, and we were falling toward it.
Duane was there, the trim Boy Scout of the sea, wearing a backpack.
“Don't let go of the railing until you have a good grip on the ladder,” he said. I made a
noise like a strangled fish.
The tanker was so tall and so wide that it seemed to outstrip my entire field of vision.
Yet the distance between it and us was surprisingly nimble in the way it diminished.
At this
rate,
I thought—
Then we were at the ladder, a wooden ladder hanging down the rain soaked hull.
Wood?
Its treads hung from thick ropes dark with sea scum. I grabbed it and found myself clinging
to the outside of twenty million gallons of Mexican crude. We had boarded the
Pink Sands.
When Port Arthur began its life as an oil town, ships came here to take the stuff away.
But now, of course, they bring it in, by the half-million-barrel load. The question, especially
pointed in the aftermath of a spill, is how to make sure these ships don't crash, despite tak-
ing so much cargo up such a narrow waterway. Or perhaps the question is why they don't
crash more often. The answer, I was here to learn, is that any large tanker that enters the
Sabine-Neches Waterway is required to carry a pair of Sabine pilots.
On the wide, linoleum-floored bridge, we met Captain Tweedel, Duane's colleague and
president of the Sabine Pilots. A tall, clean-cut man wearing chinos and a braided belt,
Tweedel had grown up in Port Arthur. (Though he now lived in Beaumont. His wife had
insisted on not living in sight of a refinery.)
The two captains got down to work, staring out the window with that look people get
when they have just taken control of fifty-five thousand gross tons.
“Full ahead,” Tweedel ordered.
“Full ahead,” said the helmsman.
I was on my second visit to Port Arthur, several months after the
Eagle Otome
oil spill,
and the channel had long since returned to normal operation. But questions still lingered;
the government had yet to finish its investigation into the cause of the accident.
In the meantime, the Sabine Pilots had begun working with a public relations consultant,
and were surprisingly willing to let me tag along. They wanted their story to get out.
The trick to keeping an oil tanker from crashing and spilling oil all over your ecosystem,
it seems, is to have Charlie Tweedel and Duane Bennett standing on the bridge. They stand
there, staring out the window, at a piece of water they have studied and navigated for years,
and occasionally tell the nice Filipino man at the helm to adjust the rudder by ten degrees.
It's more complicated than that—but not by much.
