The Associated Press
PORTLAND, Ore. — After struggling for three days against 30-foot storm swells and winds of more than 50 mph, salvage workers succeeded Friday in attaching a rope to an oil tanker drifting off the coast of Washington that had threatened to come ashore.
The work was made easier because rough seas subsided and winds slackened Friday, when a six-person crew lowered themselves from a helicopter onto the deck of the drifting 906-foot Atigun Pass.
They then threw a line to one of four tugboats helping with the recovery.
That first "messenger line" was reinforced with an 11-inch nylon rope and the tug began pulling the supertanker back out to sea, moving northwest offshore from Long Beach. The tanker was about 28 miles offshore Friday afternoon.
"Without the crew on there, we wouldn’t have been able to do that," said Amy Gaskill, a Coast Guard spokeswoman.
The tanker, which is carrying about 20,000 gallons of fuel oil, was being towed from Portland to Shanghai to be carved up for scrap metal. It broke loose about 100 miles from the coast on Tuesday and was blown back toward land by one of the first strong storms of winter.
The tanker was riding high in the water and was pushed quickly along by the storm winds. It had come within 20 miles of shore before the helicopter crew took control of the boat.
The helicopter returned to pick up the crew and take them off the tanker overnight. They planned to return Saturday to continue efforts to replace the rope — considered a fragile and temporary solution — with a stronger steel cable. A similar rope had snapped Wednesday.
Several attempts over the three days by the tugboats to regain control of the vessel failed.
If all attempts to take control of the old tanker had failed, the Coast Guard was considering intentionally sinking it in deep water, Gaskill said. The single-hull tanker, formerly operated by British Petroleum and condemned as unsafe by the Oil Protection Act of 1990, had been docked in Portland’s harbor since 1995, Gaskill said.
Its 20,000 gallons of remaining fuel oil were caked into a tarlike paste onto a tank and could not be pumped out, she said.
The shipping agent, Netherlands-based Smit International, paid for the salvage operation.
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