Picnickers on a promontory at the edge of this nautical town regularly watch oil tankers lumbering in from Alaska, cutting a slow wake through one of America's most beautiful waterscapes.

The gargantuan ships look to be impenetrable fortresses of steel. But what the casual ship-watchers can't see is that the hulls of most of these tankers - the walls between their crude-oil cargo and the waters of Puget Sound - are but an inch and a half thick.

Most of the crude-oil tankers that come to Washington refineries have this thin, single hull. With the relative scale of these tankers - some as long as 900 feet - that's tantamount to carrying oil in a plastic bag, safety advocates say.

One nudge of a rock, or a fender-bender with another ship, and there could be crude from here to Canada, enveloping the San Juan Islands. The damage could rival or exceed that of the Exxon Valdez spill, which occurred 10 years ago this week.

Some old tankers have double-bottoms, but not double sides. That helps in groundings, but does nothing in a collision, a major hazard in these waters.

The fact that single-hulled tankers are still the backbone of the Alaska crude-oil trade a decade later is a thorn to environmentalists. If the 1989 spill produced a single rallying cry, it was that oil shippers be forced to use tankers built with a second, protective hull separated from the first by a large air space. The Exxon Valdez was a single-hulled ship.

Congress and an international treaty organization responded by mandating that all new tankers be built with double hulls, providing a 9-foot buffer between the oil and the sea. They also said old tankers with single hulls should eventually be retired.

From Holland to Japan, that mandate has had an impact, with new double-hulled vessels showing up everywhere. Everywhere, that is, but on the Alaskan oil route.

Of the 26 ships that regularly carry oil from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline terminal at Valdez to refineries in Washington, California and Hawaii, only three are equipped with double hulls. And those are old ships in use at the time of the spill. Not a single new double-hulled tanker is sailing from Valdez.

Elsewhere in the world, double-hulled tankers are being churned out by shipyards. More than a quarter of the world's 3,400 tankers now have double hulls, according to data provided by the Tanker Advisory Center in New York, Lloyd's Shipping Index and Clarkson Research in London.

In fact, a higher percentage of the tankers that call on Middle East ports are double-hulled than of those that call on this state's refinery ports at Cherry Point, Ferndale, Anacortes and Tacoma.

And the gap is widening. Another 450 double-hulled tankers are on order worldwide; only two are for the Valdez trade. The U.S. ranks 24th in the world in the percentage of tankers with double hulls.

History has abundantly demonstrated the practical benefits of double hulls. For example, in November 1997, a barge rammed into a loaded Conoco tanker in Louisiana, ripping a huge hole in the side of the ship. Because the tanker had two hulls, not a drop of oil was spilled.

There are variations among the companies shipping oil from Alaska.

Arco has ordered two new double-hulled tankers for Valdez. They will be spectacular, equipped with more safety features than law requires. The first will arrive in the summer of 2000 and the other in the summer of the following year.

BP, the biggest operator in Alaska, has three older double-hulls in its fleet of tankers; otherwise, they are double bottoms. But the company has delayed plans to build a new double-hulled tanker.
Chevron has built double-hulled tankers for the international market, but the only Chevron tanker serving Valdez is single-hulled.

And Exxon - the company that caused the Alaska spill and spent $3 billion trying to clean it up - hasn't brought any double-hulled tankers to Prince William Sound or Washington waters, nor does it have any plans to.

"I think what you are seeing are very careful decisions on building tankers," said Glen Kraatz, spokesman for Chevron Shipping Co. "People are, one, trying to defer the investment as long as they can. Two, they may be thinking very carefully about whether you need to replace all of your single-hulled fleet."

Exxon shipping representatives say the company hasn't built double hulls for Valdez because oil production is declining in Alaska.

"You get declining production, obviously you don't need as many vessels," said Art Stephen, spokesman for SeaRiver Maritime Inc., an Exxon subsidiary.

He said another disincentive is the high cost of building tankers in the United States - as much as double the overseas cost. By law, ships trading between two U.S. points - such as Valdez and the refinery ports - must be built in this country.

The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 requires that single-hulled tankers be retired based on their age and size. Generally, that means ships built 25 years ago must be retired.

Oil companies are asking the Coast Guard and Congress to allow older single-hulled tankers to stay in service another five years beyond their 25-year limit, under certain loading conditions. The issue is likely to come up in a House Transportation Committee hearing Wednesday.

Exxon has already used a loophole to extend the life of two single-hulled ships - an action environmentalists deride.

"I think they are undermining the purpose of the legislation by looking for loopholes," said Sally Lentz, a Maryland environmentalist who specializes in tanker issues.

As it stands now, one Exxon ship out of nine must retire this year and two more in 2002. Yet the company hasn't decided whether to build new ones, a process that can take two to three years. It might retrofit double-hulled cargo tanks onto its old ships, Stephen said. Or it could gamble that new ships won't be needed, even as the older ones go, because of declining oil fields, he said.

Stephen said people shouldn't be too quick to criticize Exxon: The company has spilled only 230 gallons of oil since the 11-million-gallon Valdez disaster.

Industrywide, tanker spills are down dramatically. Since 1991, there have been no spills over a million gallons in U.S. waters.

As an ironic aside, oil spills involving fishing boats have gradually increased in U.S. waters, though the volumes are much smaller. (Prince William Sound fishermen were among the angriest victims of the 1989 spill.)

The trend in the number of tanker spills has been down for a long time. It tumbled in the 1980s as public anger focused on tanker owners following a spate of big spills. New treaties pushed it down further, by altering such practices as dumping oil during tank-cleaning operations. Then came the Exxon Valdez spill, which was nowhere near the world's biggest, but first in media coverage.

The Valdez spill resulted not only in the call for double hulls, but also in several other provisions in a 1990 oil-spill law. One provision stipulates that vessel owners pay massive fines if they spill in U.S. waters. Together with a $5 billion civil judgment against Exxon - still under appeal - that law got the attention of maritime boardrooms from Greece to Singapore.

"It has scared the you-know-what out of these guys," said environmentalist Lentz.
"Liability has been a real catalyst for change," said Stewart Wade, vice president of the American Bureau of Shipping, a nonprofit shipowner organization that inspects and certifies ships.
And apart from the inaction on double hulls, change has occurred.

Indeed, since the spill, new laws and treaties have changed many aspects of oil transport. The new laws require that crews be better trained, fleet managers be better audited, ships be better inspected and companies be better prepared for spills.

The big oil companies that charter have been sharing inspection information and are, for the first time, blackballing shoddy operators.

Ultimately, though, all of this depends on monitoring and regulation. The new rules are undermined by shoddy application, said Ed Wenk, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied tankers for decades.

Shipowners are regulated - none too well, Wenk said - by a patchwork of agencies. The U.S. Coast Guard is considered among the best, second perhaps to some ship-inspection agencies in Europe. But the most influential regulators are nonprofit organizations run by the shipowners themselves. These "classification societies" set standards for countries that register ships, including "flag of convenience" states such as Vanuatu, Liberia, Panama, which are famous for offering cheap registration fees and relaxed standards.

The state of Washington's Department of Ecology began inspecting ships and demanding certain standards after the Exxon spill. In response, an international organization of independent tanker owners known as Intertanko sued in federal court to stop the practice. The U.S. government has intervened on the side of Intertanko, arguing that if individual states set separate standards, it will be impossible to manage.

Joe Angelo, director of standards for the Coast Guard, said his agency leans in the direction of protecting the environment, not shipowners.

But Lentz, the environmentalist, says Coast Guard officers have been "dragging their feet and backtracking" on ship safety. Even Jerry Aspland, former president of Arco's tanker fleet and now president of the California Maritime Academy, said he's concerned about "complacency" in tanker operations.

Lentz's organization, Ocean Advocates, has asked Congress to investigate the Coast Guard for failing to enforce several provisions of the 1990 oil-spill act.

For example, it alleges that the Coast Guard isn't forcing shippers to load single-hulled tankers in a way that makes them safer. That method is called "hydrostatic loading," with oil loaded into a tanker only high enough to match the waterline outside. This creates a pressure balance, meaning the bottom of a tanker can be punctured and little or no oil will leak out.

Oil stopped gushing out of the Exxon Valdez as soon as the level in the tanks reached balance with the waterline. Otherwise, five times more oil would have spilled.

But hydrostatic loading means tankers carry less oil than their capacity. "When all the numbers were crunched, we made a decision this was not economically feasible," said the Coast Guard's Angelo.

Fred Felleman, a Seattle environmentalist, said this bottom-line thinking is the result of too many Coast Guard officers retiring, or preparing to retire, to work for shipping companies.

Despite these problems - and despite the lack of double-hulled tankers - the decade since the Exxon Valdez spill has been a good one for tanker safety. And some tanker companies have taken extra steps to keep it that way.

Arco and BP regularly use a computer simulator in California to train tanker crews in real-life emergencies, going so far as to bring in Coast Guard vessel traffic managers, tug operators and others to play their roles.

Overseas, some advances are also notable. Lars Carlsson, a shipping executive based in Sweden, is operating tankers with 40 crew members. That's a staggering number, nearly twice what is assigned to a typical tanker. At the time of the spill, the trend in the industry was to reduce crew size, with Exxon leading the way, and some say crew fatigue contributed to the Valdez accident.

But Carlsson claims he's actually saving money with the bigger crews. They do so much maintenance work at sea that there's little left to do when the vessel enters a shipyard for its mandatory makeover, he explains.

"When we come into the shipyard every third year, we just paint the outside," he said.
Carlsson is also building new tankers as extraordinary as his hiring practices. They'll be very wide and have a shallow draft. They will have double hulls, double engines, double propellers and double rudders.

In this country, Arco is also building double-hulled tankers with special safety features. Their oversized twin rudders and a forward-pushing, electrically driven bow thruster mean the 125,000-ton ships will be able to maneuver and stop more sharply and more quickly than any other oil-carrying vessel on the water.

The revolutionary design drove up the cost of the $165 million ships by about 7 to 10 percent, said recently retired Arco Marine President Hershal Kohut, but it was well worth it.
"Everything was the best that we could get," said Levine.

Construction was delayed once. But sometime in August or September of the year 2000, the picnickers in Anacortes will see the first of Arco's Millennium class tankers sailing toward Cherry Point.
Will the steps by the Swedes and Arco start a trend in American tanker traffic?
Doubtful, says Carlsson, the maverick Swedish shipper.

"We get a lot of appreciation," he said. "But they find us as strange creatures."
Eric Nalder's phone message number is 206-464-2056. His e-mail address is: enalder@seattletimes.com

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