Canada, U.S. practice sopping up oil spill

BAR HARBOR – Rotors flapped, engines purred, and orange inflatable booms swept the harbor.

At the joint United States and Canadian coast guards’ mock oil-spill drill Thursday afternoon in Frenchman Bay, all systems were on high alert.

“It’s very important to have the joint countries working together so that there’s not this big confusion when disasters happen,” said David Bittle, first class boatswain’s mate. “If something happens, we have to be able to respond.”

Bittle is a member of the Coast Guard’s Atlantic Strike team based out of Fort Dix, N.J. He said that he is a veteran of real oil spills and understood firsthand the need for these practice missions. The cleanup after a December Delaware River oil spill just wrapped up.

“That was pretty bad,” Bittle said. “They still didn’t have a [damage] estimate, but it’s bad.”

The waters off the coast of Maine have experienced oil spills, including a 98,000-gallon oil spill in Buzzards Bay off Massachusetts in 2003, a 2001 spill in Nova Scotia and a 1996 spill caused by a sinking tugboat in Passamaquoddy Bay.

Since the stakes of an oil spill could be high, the two coast guards pulled out all the stops for the joint training mission. Several vessels, including the high-tech cutter Abbie Burgess and a 55-foot Aids to Navigation boat, circled in the bay’s gray waters, awaiting deployment of a new Canadian oil-trapping boom. A Coast Guard oil-spotting helicopter buzzed through the air high above, and more than 70 sailors stood at the ready on vessels.

“In this scenario, the simulated product is home heating oil,” said Luke Pinneo, U.S. Coast Guard public affairs officer.

The joint operation, which was months in the planning, was supported by the Environmental Protection Agency. Other participating agencies included the Canadian Wildlife Service, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and the Maine Marine Patrol.

Suddenly, the two small boats pulling the Canadian boom zipped into view. Their newly developed “harbour-buster” boom, an inflatable orange device that corrals the oil spill and allows another boat to pump the oil out of the water, is agile and maneuvered easily around the larger boats.

In contrast, the American oil-containing boom that was inflated and deployed from the Abbie Burgess took longer to get into the water. Once in the water, officials said, its greater reach would allow it to clean a larger swath of ocean.

The two styles of booms together would allow the two country’s coast guards flexibility in their oil-spill recovery missions, according to officials.

“Because we share a border, it’s essential that we speak the same language and that we’re efficient in training,” Ben Crowell, public affairs officer at the Southwest Harbor Coast Guard Station, said during the mission.