ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An oil tanker being loaded with fuel at a refinery broke free of its moorings in the Cook Inlet port of Nikiski and drifted until it went aground about a half mile away, its owners said Thursday.
About five 42-gallon barrels of product were spilled, said a Coast Guard spokes-man, Petty Officer Eric Chandler, but three of those barrels were confined to the ship. Only two barrels — less than 100 gallons — ended up in Cook Inlet.
The 575-foot Seabulk Pride was moored overnight in Nikiski on the Kenai Peninsula when it was struck by an ice floe and broke free at 5:25 a.m., said Sarah Simpson of the Tesoro Corp. in San Antonio.
"A large piece of ice floating in the channel — from what they tell me it was traveling pretty fast — struck the vessel," Simpson said.
Tesoro has a refinery in Nikiski, which is about 80 miles south of Anchorage. The double-hulled tanker was being loaded when it drifted away, she said.
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The Coast Guard said the tanker was carrying four kinds of fuel, including 94,951 barrels of a thick residual oil product similar in consistency to asphalt that was not processed at the Tesoro refinery. In total, the Seabulk Pride was carrying about 4.9 million gallons of petroleum product when it broke free.
The incident is unlike the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, which occurred in a more remote area in Prince William Sound. The Exxon Valdez, unlike the Seabulk Pride, was carrying raw crude oil when it ran aground on a chartered reef, spilling 11 million gallons.
