Tagged: oil spill response

A small oil spill this week in Port Angeles turned out to be a lot less severe than originally feared.  Clean-up crews are still working to get sticky residue out of the the harbor. But the incident shows how preparedness can pay off.

Washington state put laws in place six years ago that did just what they were intended to do early Wednesday morning, according to the Department of Ecology.

COUPEVILLE, Wash. — The sunken derelict ship that was refloated in Penn Cove is scheduled to be towed from Whidbey Island to a Seattle shipyard Wednesday to be dismantled.

A spill from the ship has cost nearly $2 million, so far.

Washington State already has some of the highest oil spill readiness standards in the country – if not in the world.

An update to those regulations is raising that bar even higher.

The tightening is in response to the catastrophic BP oil spill nearly two years ago in the Gulf of Mexico. 

The new law places new requirements on oil companies operating in Puget Sound or on the Columbia River.

Some lawmakers in Olympia say “no.” They’re proposing a bill that would make the oil industry pay for a variety of precautions designed to protect Washington’s shorelines from an Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon disaster.

(I wrote about the state of Washington's oil spill prevention and response while the Gulf spill was ongoing last spring ...)