BP cleanup extends beyond area waters

The stench of oil lingers near the dry dock station at the C-Port 3 Northern Expansion in Port Fourchon.

The “Ella G,” one of the final oily vessels to go through decontamination at the port, is outside its normal aquatic boundaries with chemical-laden water dripping down its vibrant orange hull onto the concrete below.

The crude that once covered it has been vanquished. Some of it was dissipated, and some of it was blasted into the adjacent canal where it was contained and retrieved by absorbent boom.

Men and women, safely entrenched in yellow jump suits taped snuggly to steel toe boots and rubber gloves, with their eyes visible behind clear visors attached to hard hats and their hands gripping a powerful hose, blasted the inside and outside of more than 200 vessels since the April 20 blowout of the Macondo well some 50 miles south of the Louisiana coast.

They were charged with purifying the tainted vessels and now, at the beginning of the 2011 calendar year, all that remains in the ships’ wake are oily memories and a pungent scent that infiltrates the unaccustomed nose n and pride in completed work.

The de-oiling of vessels, their equipment and the cleaning supplies themselves morphed into an unprecedented project that required the formation of safety policies and operational procedures cross-checked by stake-holding entities n the U.S. Coast Guard, BP PLC and, at this port, Edison Chouest Offshore.

On it went, like an endless stream of patrons waiting in line at a car wash, only if the vehicles were drenched in oil and sat atop the shade-free surface spanning the Gulf of Mexico for months. Only if the interior cargo departments were also caked with oil residue and only if the attendants were washing the vehicles for the first time.

“What’s really been a testament to the success of this thing is none of these guys had any experience in this when they came here,” said Monte Orr, a self-described safety monitor/ supervisor/ contractor who played an instrumental role in the process.

“In decon, they had no idea [what they were doing]. We trained them and taught them how to do it safely, and we’ve not had any OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) reportable accidents on this job since its beginning in June. That’s a feat. That’s something that I certainly hang my hat on and I’m proud to be able to say it.”

Throughout the seven-month clean up, C-Port 3 officials said minor caustic chemical burns were the only blips on their safety record and there were no lost-time or recordable accidents.

When Port Fourchon was selected as a vessel decontamination location a few weeks after the extent of the spill became known, officials with BP PLC, in an effort to gain maritime expertise, partnered with Edison Chouest Offshore.

Joel Barrios, a dispatcher with ECO, works as a site manager for C-Port 3 Northern Expansion decontamination.

“They were looking for specific type of boats and the different capacities and a lot of the logistics people that were in the office didn’t know what a spud barge was,” Barrios said. “They didn’t know what an OSV (offshore service vessel) was or a fast recovery craft, so we were able to give them some information and kind of educate them on what they were looking for.”

Crews working from the C-Port decontamination site were tasked with cleaning the large vessels n between 80 and 420 feet long n so that they may be returned to the seas and resume work. Beneath the decks of the barges and tugboats are the tanks that held the MC252 oil retrieved from the Gulf of Mexico that were plagued by oil residue and in some cases hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas created when microbes ingest oil.

“When the boats came in, they could open the tanks in fresh air in case there was an H2S problem, assess the H2S problem,” said J.D. Hancock, a BP retiree who returned to the workforce as a decontamination site manager. “They’d call Baker Petrolite and they would mitigate it, put scavenger material in it and circulate the tanks to get rid of the H2S and that product was offloaded [at the mitigation yard at the end of the canal].”

Vessel decontamination was based on three classifications, which determined the course of action when applied to ships. Stage 1 indicated water blasting as the vessels came into the port, Stage 2 indicated the ship could safely transit from one port to the next, but still had oil aboard and Stage 3 meant the ship was devoid of MC252 oil and could be returned to the owner.

Decon protocol allowed only one cleaning agent to be used above water. PES-51, described by Hancock as a larger-scale Fast Orange hand cleaner, is a citrus-based (limonene) hydrocarbon cleaner with toxic qualities. Because of its insolubility, it can be skimmed from atop the water and is seen as an effective oil spill response agent.

“As the [PES-51] would dissolve the oil, we would let it sit there for a couple of minutes and then we would pressure wash it at high pressure, scrub it and let the runoff run into the water and catch it with absorbent pads and booms,” Barrios said.

Each vessel that underwent cleaning was surrounded by boom at a 25-foot radius, Barrios said.

“We have done approximately 240 vessels here in Port Fourchon,” Barrios said. “Quantity wise, that’s not the most compared to the other decon sites. There is a couple of other sites, but a lot of the other sites did small vessels, the VOO vessels, which a lot of them vessels didn’t see any oil.

“It took anywhere from 4-7 days to do a 300-foot offshore supply vessel that was sitting in the oil for 3 or 4 months, having oil circulating through its coolant systems and taking oil onto the back deck. There was some pretty nasty stuff that came through here.”

The nastiest vessels, Barrios and Hancock agreed, were the “Big Gulps.” Designed by an Amelia man for the clean-up response, the vessels resembled a “lawn mower,” with a dam skimming the oil into tanks and pushing water underneath as it traveled in reverse, its speed determined by the amount of oil in a particular area.

The introductory Big Gulp skimmed 310,000 gallons in its first day, 98 percent of which was pure oil, Barrios said, and seven more were fabricated in its likeness. All eight, four offshore and four near shore, were decontaminated at Port Fourchon and took longer than a month to clean.

“They had a line break on a six-inch pump while it was pumping and oil went all over the deck of the boat,” the Chouest dispatcher said. “And these barges didn’t just come off the shipyard. They weren’t freshly painted. These barges had a good amount of scale. They pretty much took them out of the graveyard it seems like.

“What ended up happening is that oil got on the deck and that scale acted like a sponge. The only way to get that cleaned, we beat it. We beat it with hammers and chipped the oil away.”

At the height of decontamination, there were approximately 15 sites across the Gulf Coast, and C-Port 3 utilized more than 30 pressure wash stations. “We were blowing and going,” Orr said. “We were on full-tilt boogie man.”

The process has since slowed, with the equipment being deconned two weeks ago and the decontamination at C-Port 3 completed at the start of the New Year.

“In the period of time, with the man-hours we have invested in this project, nobody else has done with what we’ve done,” Barrios said.

“The end result was where we’re at today, finishing a project and UAC (United Area Command) said we achieved a world class safety record,” Hancock added.

The Macondo well blowout and Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 set off an array of issues, both concrete and theoretical. Questions linger concerning the long-term effects on the economy and impacted ecosystems, but as of now, the extent of the damages can’t be accurately quantified.

“This is supplemental income for a lot of people and a lot of companies,” Barrios said. “There is still work out there and our companies are positioning themselves to get a hold of some of that work so we can keep our people around, keep them employed and keep their families fed.”

More than eight months after the BP oil spill, however, the cleanup of an estimated 150 million gallons of crude oil and the vessels that came into contact with it is complete, at least on the surface. In BP’s publicized effort to “Make it right,” the efforts to monitor and remediate oil sightings will continue.

“This will be transitioned into the [Gulf Coast Restoration Organization] for the long-term remediation,” Hancock said. “They will be charged with making sure if oil appears anywhere, hits a beach for the next several years or whatever, to get in and take appropriate measures to remediate it and clean it.”

As the process winds down, workers at C-Port 3 northern expansion work in a “decon pool” to decontaminate equipment used to clean vessels up to 420 feet long. ERIC BESSON