SULLOM VOE, SCOTLAND — Above the churning North Sea, helicopter pilot Chris Griffiths drops down for a closer look at the Agip Lazio, an Italian oil tanker riding serenely amid the whitecaps.
The Agip Lazio passes inspection. Around the tanker, as long as two football fields, there is nothing but clean, if turbulent, water. What Griffiths is looking for-the telltale stain that says the ship is soiling the sea with dirty ballast water-isn`t there, and he flies on.
``It`s been years since we had to prosecute anybody,`` he says over the roar in the four-seater Bolkow 105 copter. ``But, then, they know we`re looking. It`s a preventative measure. That`s human nature, isn`t it?``
On the way home, Griffiths flies over another one of the ounces of prevention that have made Sullom Voe a model for tanker ports.
Below, a small launch delivers a pilot named John Wagstaff to guide the Nord Ocean, a Singapore-flag tanker, as it is about to leave the open sea and begin the 11-mile voyage into the harbor.
One year after the oil spill outside Valdez, Alaska, debate goes on over how to run a tanker port. Critics of Valdez hold up Sullom Voe as an example of how to do things right. Delegations from Alaska have become regular visitors to the port, sheltered amid the low, treeless hills of the Shetland Islands. (Voe is the local word for fiord.)
The comparison rouses mixed feelings in Capt. George H. Sutherland, director of Shetland`s ports and harbors.
On the one hand, he struggles to avoid hubris. ``It`s wrong to say that no accidents can happen here. Accidents can happen anywhere. You can`t handle oil without spills.``
On the other, he is proud of the rules established to prevent and minimize spills and, especially, of the way they are enforced.
Mostly, there is a refusal to cut corners. A pilot guides a tanker from the point it encounters the first hazard until it leaves port and returns to the open sea. Pilots spend 10 days on ships, then work five days in the port`s radar room, giving expert guidance to their colleagues as they guide the tankers in.
Four tugs escort each tanker in and out of port. Once in, every ship gets a safety inspection and must sail empty if its flunks.
If a drop of oil is spilled, loading stops. It even stopped one day when a painter dropped a paint brush into the water. When the wind blows more than 30 miles per hour, the port is closed. In this North Sea outpost, that`s not rare.
Despite all this, small spills occur. But an around-the-clock emergency team is ready to go. Thirty-six incidents took place last year, most involving less than a gallon of oil, but adding up to 1,487 gallons: of this, 1,165 gallons were recovered which, given the nature of oil, is probably as much as possible.
The result is a family of otters that plays around the tanker jetties, while seals sun themselves amid seabirds on an island barely 100 feet away.
``This is the cleanest harbor anywhere,`` Sutherland says.
Two things led to this state of affairs. One involved careful planning. The other resulted from bad planning.
Two 36-inch pipelines run from the Brent and Ninian fields, about 110 miles away from Shetland, to Sullom Voe. When the fields were first discovered in 1971, the islanders knew what was coming. Far from being Arctic innocents, they were veteran sailors with no illusions about oil companies or the habits of tankers.
The Shetlanders got a bill through Parliament giving their local council control over the port. Armed with this muscle and the ownership of the land under the terminal, they forced the oil companies to accept local rules and abide by them.
But things got off to the worst start imaginable. On Dec. 30, 1978, barely five weeks after the port opened, a fire broke out in a tug engine. The tug let go of the cable linking it to an Esso tanker, and the tanker hit a jetty. More than 200,000 tons of fuel oil spilled into the harbor.
The result was a ``hell of a mess,`` Sutherland says. Some cleanup equipment lay under snow drifts. Other gear was locked in a shed and no one could find the key. The oil fouled the shores and killed 3,000 birds.
``The outcry was enormous,`` Sutherland recalls. ``There were demands to close the terminal.`` Instead, the port learned from the experience, toughened its rules and has had nothing vaguely similar since.