Incident at Henry Island | A day in the life

||| FROM BILL SYMES and ELAINA THOMPSON |||

At 8:23 AM on a sunny Friday, May 3, 2024, Elaina Thompson answered her ringing phone to find herself speaking to the US Coast Guard. For most folks, a call from the Coast Guard would be a bit of a surprise, to say the least, but not so for Elaina, who is Executive Director of Islands’ Oil Spill Association (IOSA). IOSA is a community based first-responder organization aimed at safeguarding the San Juan Islands from marine oil pollution. Calls from the Coast Guard to its Executive Director can occur at any time of day and any time of year, on New Years Eve or July 4 or on a random sunny morning in May. While not exactly welcome, these calls go straight to the reason that IOSA exists.

On this May morning, the Coast Guard Duty Officer explained to Elaina that late the night before, a fisherman had fallen asleep at the helm of his large wooden fish boat in Haro Strait, west of Henry Island. No longer under control, the boat had rammed the south tip of the island. Its old wooden hull did not take kindly to this treatment and began to sink as water flooded into the boat’s interior through the breach opened by the collision. The skipper had called the Coast Guard, who rescued him and his dog from the sinking vessel. By the time Elaina picked up the phone that morning, the wreck was already lying on the bottom in 37 feet of water.

The duty officer asked Elaina if IOSA could quickly visit the site of the wreck, assess the danger of oil products fouling the shoreline, and report back. Unfortunately, IOSA’s response vessel had just been hauled for maintenance, but Elaina told the officer she’d make a few calls to see what was possible. Elaina called IOSA Operations Manager, Rick Winings, and discussed the situation including what boats might be available within the local community. After a few phone calls and local coordination, Rick was aboard a boat helmed by an IOSA Tier One (response-trained) volunteer, headed out of Roche Harbor towards the wreck.

Arriving off Henry Island at around 10:30 AM, Rick found a TowBoatUS vessel already on site. With the help of TowboatUS’s side-scan sonar (photo above) they soon located the sunken fish boat and anchored a buoy to mark its approximate position (photo below). They could both see and smell diesel oil on the water and reported this and the wreck’s location to USCG and WA State Department of Ecology (DOE). A sorbent sweep towed through the visible sheen came up with little color; off-road diesel is dyed red, so this suggested that the oil then in the water had been spread out by the fast tidal current and might be difficult to recover. A little while later, Brendan Cowan, Director of the San Juan County Department of Emergency Management (DEM), and a responder from DOE overflew the site in a float plane chartered by DOE and got some aerial photographs of the slick. Aerial views of active incidents are one of the best ways to view the spread of oil on water (which can be very difficult to see from a boat or shoreline vantage point).

Around 1:00 PM, Focus Wildlife called Elaina to ask for an IOSA assessment of wildlife in the area, and to inquire if IOSA had any trained wildlife volunteers that might be available for deployment. By 1:30 PM Elaina was on the phone with Republic Services discussing the nearby Geographic Response Plans (“GRPs”, plans to protect pre-surveyed sensitive locations). Phone calls continued throughout the day to arrange local logistics and coordinate between IOSA, USCG, DOE, and DEM. At 8:00 PM, Elaina was still on the phone, talking to industry and agency partners and recruiting IOSA volunteers for the next day’s work.

The next morning the agencies and industry partners had organized to manage the response. Elaina was back on the phone at IOSA HQ and Rick was on scene with IOSA Tier One volunteers assisting Republic Services to deploy containment boom as indicated in a GRP to protect a vulnerable cove on Henry Island. Unfortunately, just as the boom was deployed, USCG delivered bad news: high winds were forecast for the next 24 hours which would render the boom ineffective, so out it came and back into its storage trailer. Another IOSA volunteer assisted Focus Wildlife in scanning for oiled birds and distressed mammals until the weather system arrived that evening.

The USCG contracted with Global Diving and Salvage, a major salvage firm with facilities in several mainland ports, to manage recovery of the wreck. They were on scene within 24 hours with divers to plug the fuel vents on the vessel to stop the pollution, and shortly after that process they had an underwater rover robot in action to track the vessel’s movement down-slope in the heavy current. Once the weather had calmed a bit, the rover was back underwater verifying that the condition of the hull was stable enough to be lifted safely with slings and a crane. On the 7th day after the wreck, the hulk was lifted out of 70+ feet of water onto a barge and taken to a salvage yard.

Elaina pointed out that this incident wrapping up within seven days “…is actually incredibly fast, especially considering this was a remote location, with people and equipment coming from far away. It doesn’t always go that well. Sometimes you have severe weather delays. Sometimes you have a lack of resources available. Sometimes the boat moves deep underwater rendering it unsafe to pull without specialized equipment. Sometimes ownership is obscure, who’s going to pay slows response, and what’s going to happen depends on a number of factors… in this case, the State and the Coast Guard decided to open up their funding to get this vessel out of the water due to its environmentally sensitive location and risk of pollution.”

IOSA trains its volunteers be first on-site, to assess the hazards and pollution risks, and to communicate the details through HQ (Elaina and her phone). Elaina relays the information to USCG and other responding agencies and their industry partners, and, when so requested, directs IOSA response through Operations Manager, Rick Winings, or through a lead Tier One volunteer to undertake initial mitigation measures and to assist other responders as appropriate.

In 2023 and 2024 IOSA responded to 31 oil spills within the San Juan Islands. As long as humans use boats to ply local waterways for commercial and recreational purposes, there will always be a next time, and there will always be a need for IOSA within the remote waters of San Juan County. Elaina knows that before too long she’ll pick up her phone once again to find the US Coast Guard on the line. Until then……

(Thanks to Rick Winings for his help in developing this story, also Kari Koski and Brendan Cowan for helpful input.)