A cynic might say there’s nothing special about the Princess Kathleen, a shipwreck near Juneau that’s the current site of an oil-spill response.

The ship is just one of thousands in the world that has been singled-out for special attention because of quirks in federal spending or historical circumstance. There are more than 70 vessels under the sea in Alaska that might hold oil like the Princess Kathleen, and some are certainly bigger. Together they likely hold millions of gallons of oil.

The Princess Kathleen has been lying on an undersea slope off Lena Point near Juneau since 1952 and local reports of an oily sheen on the water near the shipwreck go back at least to the early 1990s. People near the action generally don’t say whether the Princess Kathleen should be a priority; mostly because they’re focused on the task at hand. The spill response—which could cost millions before its finished—started because reports of the Kathleen’s sheen became more frequent, officials say.

They won’t speculate on whether the increased reports are due to oil leaking faster in recent years, or an increase in the number of people at Lena Point. They likely don’t know the answer to that, because two things are happening at the same time. One is the slow degradation of the Kathleen’s oil bunkers. The other is the construction on the nearby shore of a new multi-million dollar sea science campus where a hundred or so biologists, oceanographers, lab technicians and other employees go to work each day. Their campus, the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute, is on a cliff about 300 feet above the water at Lena Point.

“There have been ongoing reports of sheen in the area, and so the Coast Guard found it prudent to do an assessment of the site,” says Petty Officer 1st Class David Mosely, a spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard. “It became a concern.”

Mosely is continuously briefed on details of the Kathleen. He’s also prepared to talk, albeit in vague terms, about the worldwide problem of shipwreck spills.

“We’re looking at an endemic problem. There is a potential across the U.S. and across the world—there is a potential for a release such as we are having here, with the Kathleen,” he says. “It’s not a prime fishing area, but everywhere in Southeast is connected, so we are using kid gloves so we can mitigate any spill or problem that might arise from the Kathleen.”

The U.S. Coast Guard isn’t running the show alone. They have a “unified command” for the response, which includes the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and private companies contracted to dive on the wreck, deploy spill booms on the surface during the work and do dry-land work such as run computer models to estimate the amount of oil on the shipwreck.

The day this newspaper hits the streets the unified command from the Princess Kathleen site will host an open house in Juneau. It’s expected to announce what will be done to prevent a spill that would seem inevitable, predictable and preventable—not to mention embarrassing—if it were allowed to happen. Early estimates—created by studying the shipwreck itself and some schematics of the Princess Kathleen and documents of its voyage that history was kind enough to preserve—say that up to 150,000 gallons of bunker oil could still be onboard. A more exact figure will likely be announced by the time you are reading this.

The project, which could cost millions to complete or millions more to ignore, will be paid for partly by an oil spill trust fund established after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. In September 1952 when the Princess Kathleen ran aground, the 352-foot passenger liner was owned by Canadian Pacific Railroad, and soon afterward salvage rights were reportedly sold at least once, to a company the Press hasn’t been able to find a name for or record of. Questions about enforcement are precisely the stuff Coastie PR guys such a Mosely are paid to politely deflect. “Responsible parties are found on a case-by-case basis,” he says, adding the Coast Guard is working on that but hasn’t released anything. At the moment, Mosely says, “We are trying to reduce the potential of a spill, and that is our focus.”

Juneau had not seen a major shipwreck in almost 40 years when the Princess Kathleen went off course in Favorite Channel on September 7, 1952. Southeast Alaska’s most famous tragic shipwreck, the sinking of the Princess Sophia, happened in 1918. It’s a harrowing story of a boat with about 340 people onboard hung-up on a reef for almost two days but inaccessible to rescuers because of a storm. No one onboard the Princess Sophia survived when the ship broke and sank.

In 1952 the grounding of the Princess Kathleen had the benefit of more lifeboats, more responders from Juneau and a Coast Guard cutter that make two trips to evacuate about 150 passengers. One report by a historian notes no panic at all, but some stranded passengers assumed they were on an island, only to find out later they would be led on a bushwhack through the forest to a nearby road. One person reportedly had a heart attack later in the lobby of the Baranof Hotel. The 3 a.m. grounding may have been due to high winds, made worse by a captain who failed to order his crew to turn on the radar while navigating the channels of the Inside Passage. Crew members watched the Princess Kathleen slide backward from its resting place at about 11 a.m. as the stern filled with water. There are photos of the ship sinking that morning, listing to the port side and sliding into the sea.

Since then, the Princess Kathleen, with three intact smokes stacks and a debris field of tide scattered luggage, bottles and dinner plates with cruise ship logos, has become one of Juneau’s destination dives. It’s also a risk—an unnamed diver’s death is reported in a document of local historic sites, but a newspaper archive search couldn’t confirm it—to both the recreational divers and to the waters off Lena Point.

Divers say the oil bunkers might survive a long time, but their time is known to be limited. “They’re basically just big steel boxes, distributed in different parts of the ship,” says Steve Lloyd, a recreational diver who has been involved in a handful of “discoveries” involving ships whose locations hadn’t been previously verified by divers. “If a ship is relatively intact then the fuel doesn’t spill,” Lloyd says. “Eventually they rust and they collapse in on themselves and eventually the oil comes up all at once.”

Lloyd and other divers watch the constant stream of info about the Princess Kathleen with interest and some skepticism. (In addition to news reports, there are streams of info from the Coast Guard, the situation reports or “sit reps” of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and photos at the web site of contractor Global Diving and Salvage, Inc., one of the private contractors on the job.)

News reports from Juneau have confirmed a few things Lloyd expected, but he says Alaska has hundreds of similar wrecks, and the shipwreck spill prevention is a relatively new thing.

“I can’t tell from the press reports if the concern is that it is suddenly leaking oil, or if it finally got somebody’s attention,” Lloyd says. “All it would take on any of the wrecks is a big storm.”

Lloyd pointed toward a handful of famous shipwreck spills as examples Alaskans might learn from. The famous sheen at the U.S.S Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor is one.

The U.S.S. Mississinewa, a sunken World War II Navy oil tanker, is another. When oil appeared on sandy beaches in the Federated States of Micronesia, it was tracked to the Mississinewa. The U.S. Navy responded and the operation pumped 2 million gallons off the ship.

“They’ve learned (how to respond) because it was bad PR to have American Naval vessels burping oil on the white sand beaches of Micronesia,” Lloyd says.

Lloyd isn’t cynical about this stuff, but he does figure a dry-land assessment of Alaska shipwrecks might yield tanks larger and more threatening than those on the Princess Kathleen. “Location is critical, because in the case of ship that’s sunken in the open ocean, there is no practical thing that can be done—and deep water in Alaska doesn’t always mean far from shore.” Lloyd says it doesn’t really matter how the Princess Kathleen decisions came about, the important thing is that the response is happening. “It’s known that these wrecks exist. It is known or could easily be ascertained which ones are at risk and it would be nice to do something proactive,” he says.

There are people working on the dry-land research portion of a search such as Lloyd describes. A database is being built at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that manages the campus on Lena Point near where the Princess Kathleen response is playing out. But the database action is taking place far from Juneau.

Near its center is Dagmar Etkin, a science consultant who works with NOAA from her home base in Cortlandt Manor, New York.

“Part of what we’re doing is looking to see what would happen if you had a leak in one place. What would it mean in terms of environmental impact to fishing grounds and to other sensitive environments,” Etkin says.

One NOAA database is called RUST, an acronym for “Resources and Undersea Threats” and it includes such things as sunken pipelines, drilling platforms and other stuff besides shipwrecks. (NOAA does not provide public access to the database.)

The agency also has a project underway called the Wreck Oil Recovery Program, or “WORP,” which Etkin says will prioritize wrecks and revamp the RUST database. (And yes, NOAA types know about their reputation as acronym fetishists. They’ve been hooked since SCUBA.)

Etkin builds databases of her own, and although she doesn’t know what information RUST currently contains about Alaska waters, she provided some estimates for this story. She counts 77 vessels in Alaska waters that sank with oil onboard, and most are at rest among the Aleutian Islands. The Alaska shipwrecks could contain between 3 and 23 million gallons of oil. Twenty-eight of them are the size of the Princess Kathleen or larger. Etkin also counts 8,500 potential shipwreck spills worldwide, and estimates up to 180 million gallons of oil could be in their tanks.

The Princess Kathleen, Etkin says, “is relatively small,” but she’s also heard it qualified for funds from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, and the trust requires an official designation of the risk. “Those folks need to be convinced there is an imminent and substantial proof that there is a risk to the environment,” she says.

Etkin says WORP should be creating information that assesses environmental threats for shipwrecks within a ten months or a year. With that, managers can show which ones pose the highest threat to U.S. waters and qualify for trust money, which comes from a tax on oil shipping. “But all of this work is dependant on funding, on appropriations from senators,” she says of the database and research work.

In other words, it depends on congressmen and senators and a lot of political jockeying among the states.

One shipwreck off the Northern California Coast became famous for mysterious spills in the 1990s. The Jacob Luckenbach sank in 1953 about 17 miles south of the Golden Gate Bridge after colliding with its sister vessel, the Hawaiian Pilot, in thick fog. Forty years later people began finding oiled birds and slicks hitting Bay Area beaches. The spills were not continuous, and some people noticed they were arriving after storms. The Coast Guard went on its hunt for “the responsible party” and used an oil-fingerprinting technology. They found that several local spills months, sometimes years, apart all had same source.

Etkin authored a report to NOAA that uses the Jakob Luckenbach as an example. The first big “mystery spill” came in 1992 but no one removed oil from the tanks until ten years later. During that decade each storm set more oil loose from the shipwreck. Etkin reports that the intermittent spills killed 51,000 birds and eight sea otters and floated over 40,000 square miles of ocean. All told, the mitigation costs were $20 million, according to Etkin’s report.

“It’s a good example of what happens when you don’t deal with a wreck,” Etkin says.

scott@anchoragepress.com