13,200-barrel oil spill shuts down Mississippi River

NEW ORLEANS - A tanker spilled a half-million gallons of crude oil into the Mississippi River on Wednesday, closing a busy shipping route for 26 miles and threatening wildlife.

No injuries were reported, but some pelicans and other animals were found covered with oil, said Roland Guidry, a state oil spill coordinator.

The 800-foot tanker Westchester lost power Tuesday evening and apparently ran aground about 60 miles southeast of New Orleans.

A cargo tank holding more than 2.2 million gallons of Nigerian crude oil lost about 567,400 gallons or 13,500 barrels, said Virginia Miller, spokeswoman for the ship's owner and operator. The spilled oil would fill about two-thirds of an Olympic-size swimming pool.

The river bottom apparently plugged most of the hole and kept the rest from escaping, Miller said. She said divers were trying to assess the damage while five skimmers and a vacuum unit pulled up the spilled oil.

Modern American tankers are built with two hulls to prevent such spills even if the outer hull ruptures, but the Westchester, registered in the Bahamas and owned by a Liberian company, was a single-hull tanker. Federal law calls for all tankers operating in U.S. waters to be double-hulled by 2015, and the Westchester was scheduled to become double-hulled in 2006, Miller said.

Coast Guard officials said it wasn't clear when or how the tank ruptured. It could have hit something already on the river bottom or its own anchor could have punctured the hull if it became pinned between the hull and river bottom, said Jim O'Brien, an oil spill specialist under contract with the Greek company the operates the tanker, Ermis Maritime Corp. In 15 years of operation, the vessel has had a couple minor spills, never more than one barrel of oil, he said.

By Wednesday evening, patches of oil from the spill floated from just south of Buras, which is 15 miles southeast of the accident site, to Boothville, about eight miles downriver, Miller said. The worst was along a three-mile river stretch from Fort Jackson to Boothville.

The Coast Guard halted of traffic on the river stalling more than a dozen vessels and forced others to change their routes, Coast Guard Petty Officer Fa'iq El-Amin said. The guard planned to open the river to upstream traffic Wednesday evening and to downstream traffic Thursday.

Containment booms were set out to prevent oil from flowing into cuts made earlier this year to divert river water into the drought-depleted wetlands of the Delta National Wildlife Refuge, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service workers said.

The area is home to pelicans, shorebirds, seabirds, crabs, shrimp and sport fish as well as more than 100,000 wintering waterfowl.

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On the Net:

Delta National Wildlife refuge: http://southeastlouisiana.fws.gov/delta.html