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Radar to spot icebergs is working again Out of service since last September, the system at infamous Bligh Reef helps with tanker safety in Alaska’s Prince William Sound Wesley Loy For Petroleum News
A radar system for spotting icebergs drifting across the shipping lanes in Prince William Sound is up and running again.
The radar had been out of service since September due to “integration problems” arising after the U.S. Coast Guard upgraded its own radar equipment at a shared station on Reef Island, an oil industry watchdog group in Valdez said.
The ice radar resumed service on March 14 and is now feeding a display to the Valdez operations base for SERVS, the Ship Escort/Response Vessel System. SERVS, a unit of Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., provides spill response and tug escorts for oil tankers hauling Alaska North Slope crude oil out of Prince William Sound.
The watchdog group, Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, praised Alyeska for its work to bring the ice radar back online.
“The company really came through,” said Donna Schantz, the council’s acting executive director.
The radar system isn’t operating yet in the Coast Guard’s Valdez vessel traffic center, which oversees tanker movement in the Sound, but the Coast Guard is getting updated software to fix the problem, the council said in a March 23 press release.
Iceberg danger The ice radar scans the waters from Reef Island west to Columbia Bay, where the retreating Columbia Glacier calves ice chunks that can drift into the shipping lanes.
Reef Island overlooks Bligh Reef, an infamous navigational hazard the tanker Exxon Valdez hit in 1989, causing an oil spill of about 11 million gallons. A factor in the disaster was that the tanker left the standard shipping lanes to avoid ice that other vessels had reported, the citizens’ council said.
In its report on the wreck, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended installing a radar system near Bligh Reef to spot icebergs and to help monitor vessel traffic, the council said.
“After the spill, evidence continued to mount about the threat posed by icebergs,” the council added. “An empty tanker struck an iceberg in the Sound in 1994 and suffered over $1 million in damage. And a technical study in the mid-1990s identified icebergs as one of the major remaining threats to tankers in the Sound.”
The council, the Coast Guard, Alyeska and other stakeholders finally succeeded in installing the ice radar in 2002 on Reef Island, where it operated fine until last September, the council said.
The radar service outage came to light after the tugboat Pathfinder hit Bligh Reef on Dec. 23. The tug, part of Alyeska’s tanker escort and docking fleet, had been out in the Sound scouting for icebergs.
The Pathfinder incident, which caused a 6,410-gallon diesel spill but no injuries, remains under investigation.
Alyeska and Coast Guard spokesmen said tugs conduct iceberg scouting runs routinely, regardless of whether the ice radar is working.
Still, all involved said they wanted to get the radar operating again as an added tool for shipping safety.
“We look forward to having the system back in service at the Coast Guard traffic center, as well as at Alyeska,” Schantz said. “We believe it can make a valuable contribution to dealing with the iceberg threat in Prince William Sound.”
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