The commander of the Coast Guard for the Atlantic area said Friday that it’s a “monumental task” to clean up hundreds of thousands of gallons of spilled fuel and other pollutants left by Superstorm Sandy in the waters off New York and New Jersey.
“The work is just beginning,” Rear Adm. Daniel Abel said during a helicopter flyover of the devastation, from the Hudson River in Manhattan past the Statue of Liberty to Staten Island.
The Coast Guard helicopter had an open side that offered a clear view of huge oily slicks in Staten Island’s Arthur Kill, a major navigational channel for the Port of New York and New Jersey.
Spills came from facilities that experienced what Abel called “catastrophic failure of tanks.”
Motiva Enterprises LLC, in Sewaren, N.J., released an estimated 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel, he said. A storage tank at a Kinder Morgan Inc. terminal in Carteret, N.J., leaked about 10,000 gallons of biodiesel. And the Phillips 66 refinery in Bayway, N.J., was flooded.
About 150 members of the U.S. Coast Guard Atlantic Strike Team are helping contain the spills, joining private contractors to set up boons “to keep the bad stuff from seeping into the larger channel,” Abel said. “You’ve got to coral it, then suck it up.”
Abel, who commands 11,000 members of the Coast Guard in his 1st Coast Guard District, said “it’s going to be a monumental task, and we’re only in the initial stages.”
It’s crucial to fully reactivate Arthur Kill, he said, because of its economic impact of more than $130 million a day, but “it’s going to take a long time to get it back.”
From the helicopter, along Staten Island, beached and sunken boats and demolished piers were not far from wrecked homes.
To make sure vessels operating now don’t strike each other or some underwater debris strewn by the storm, the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is conducting sonar scanning of the channel, Abel said.
In addition, he said, Coast Guard patrols have been checking buoys, otherwise “it’s like a highway without markers.”
As Coast Guard crews helped clean fuel from the water, city residents lined up for a dwindling gas supply on land.
One Staten Island line was so long it was visible from the helicopter.