Transcripts

BOB KELLEHER: It's a spooky morning on Lake Superior, about 2 miles off Duluth's Aerial Lift Bridge. The Coast Guard cutter Alder is socked in by fog. Superior is dead quiet and smooth as a swimming pool. These are perfect conditions for mopping up an oil spill. Jeremy Mitchell directs a dozen guardsmen on the Alder's deck. They're pulling a three-armed metal pump and folded orange fabric from aluminum crates the size of pickup trucks.

JEREMY MITCHELL: So basically, it's a system that's installed in the ship. We have to put it together, pull it out of the cargo hold so we can build the system as we're en route to the oil spill.

BOB KELLEHER: If oil spills on Lake Superior or even parts of Lakes Michigan or Huron, the Alder could be the first responder. Much of the equipment the crew would use is newly developed, although it's not all high-tech. It takes three sailors and a sturdy rope to swing a 42-foot aluminum outrigger arm from the Alder's port side. That arm will anchor a floating boom as something of an orange inflatable wall that forms into a horseshoe shape on the water surface. Before it's dumped overboard, the boom is inflated like an air mattress with a blast from a heavy-duty leaf blower.

[MACHINE WHIRRING]

JEREMY MITCHELL: You're looking about maybe a four-hour max, four- to five-hour max with a trained crew, qualified crew to set this system up. We're fortunate enough to have it actually installed in a cargo hold on the ship. So it's on the ship at all times.

BOB KELLEHER: With the floating orange boom open on one side, Mitchell says the ship cuts through a slick, forcing oil into the open mouth of the boom.

JEREMY MITCHELL: Our boom is set up in a U configuration, and it just turns it into a big funnel. And as the oil comes in, you're going to try and build up a nice pocket that surrounds that skimmer, and then you're going to clutch in your skimmer and try and drain that pocket down as the ship is going through it.

BOB KELLEHER: The skimmer can suck over 200 gallons a minute while chewing up floating debris like aluminum cans, vegetation, or dead birds. To date, there's no oil on the water. If there were, it would be pumped through a wide rubber hose to something that looks like a floating orange blimp.

JEREMY MITCHELL: They call them sea slugs. They're a big bladder. While this vessel is out skimming, it will have the bladder on the side. Once that bladder gets filled up, a tug will come alongside, gather that bladder, come in with a brand new one, and take that one to the shore so we can offload it.

BOB KELLEHER: The Alder has carried this system for four years, and so far, it's never been pressed into real service. But Mitchell says there's a lot of cargo on the Great Lakes, and spills can happen. What's important, he says, is that the crew is trained and ready, and that's not easy to maintain as the crew turns over. Alder Captain Kevin Wirth says half the crew is new since last year.

KEVIN WIRTH: This is a mission we don't typically do, but we're capable of doing. So we need to train on that, and we spend about a week a year, as well as some time for individuals to go to schools away from the ship to learn how to do what we did today.

BOB KELLEHER: Wirth says the Alder was designed with the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989 in mind.

KEVIN WIRTH: When the cutters were originally designed and built, it was the early '90s. So part of that was-- after Exxon Valdez, they thought it would be a good capability for these ships to have-- would be to skim and recover oil. So that was one of the considerations in the design and building of this ship.

BOB KELLEHER: But there are limitations. If a leaking ship is grounded, there may not be enough water depth for the Coast Guard cutter to operate. Particularly, rough seas can overwhelm the system.

KEVIN WIRTH: The deployment of that will depend on the event. We're training for a mission set that we wouldn't know when we'll need to use it. We just need to be ready to do it. And true to the motto "Semper Paratus," we're training to be ready to deploy pollution recovery gear when it's ready.

BOB KELLEHER: "Semper Paratus," the Coast Guard motto, means always ready. And for now, at least, that's true of the crew of the Alder. In Duluth, Bob Kelleher, Minnesota Public Radio news.