Abstract

Portrait of an oil spill

The January oil spill in the New York-New Jersey Harbor offers an instructive addendum to the lessons of the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Prince William Sound last March. Pristine is not the description that comes to mind for the setting of this recent spill. Industrial debris has converted the harbor, its magnificent setting notwithstanding, into an open sewer. On January 1 and 2 some 567,000 gallons escaped from the 6.7-mile pipeline connecting Exxon's Bayway refinery Co. in Linden to its terminal in Bayonne, New Jersey. The spill, still under investigation by the company and the states of New Jersey and New York, was traced to a gash in the 12-inch line where it crosses Arthur Kill, a navigable waterway separating Staten Island from New Jersey. A leak detection system that had been malfunctioning for twelve years failed to alert company operators to shut down the pipeline immediately.