Oil spill cleanup base set for Maine

PORTLAND — Within 15 months, Maine’s largest city will become one of four centers on the East Coast equipped to deal with a major oil spill, officials said.

But the manager of the Northeast division of Marine Spill Response Corp., a non-profit company created by the major oil companies, said he hopes the equipment never will have to be used in Casco Bay.

“I hope I never have to clean up an oil spill here,” said J. Stephen Dorrler. “In terms of degree of difficulty and number of areas that could be potentially contaminated, this would be a long-term cleanup operation.”

The Marine Spill company plans to station a 208-foot oil cleanup ship in Portland, 2 1/2 miles of oil booms, four skimmers to vacuum oil and a barge to store cleaned-up oil.

Portland Harbor now has enough equipment to contain 200,000 gallons of oil in the first two days of a spill. But with the new equipment, spills of up to 9 million gallons could be handled, company officials said Monday.

Dorrler said Portland will be one of only four ports in the Northeast to get response vessels. The others are New York, Cape May, N.J., and Norfolk, Va.

The Marine Spill company was created after Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 requiring oil shippers and handlers to develop a national plan for responding to oil spills.

It now is setting up and equipping oil response centers across the country to meet a February 1993 deadline.

Dorrler said a large oil spill in the Northeast would be devastating. The area has more than 15,000 miles of coastline, and a spill the size of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska would extend from Cape Cod to Norfolk, Va.

When the center is set up in Portland, the oil response ship will be equipped with skimmers that can recover 1,500 to 2,000 barrels of oil per hour and store it in special tanks.

In addition to the Marine Spill company’s equipment, Portland will have a second oil-spill containment organization operating in 1993. Clean Casco Bay Inc. recently was formed by local oil terminals to respond to and clean spills of up to 210,000 barrels of oil.