By Houston Chronicle
10/3/2010

By Zain Shauk, Houston Chronicle

A set of barges crashed into an electrical tower Sunday in the Port of Houston, prompting the U.S. Coast Guard to shut down most of the nation’s second-largest maritime shipping complex, possibly until Wednesday.

A towing vessel pushing three barges of scrap metal through the Houston Ship Channel about 6 a.m. hit a 300-foot-tall electrical tower, which carries lines across the artery, said Petty Officer Richard Brahm, a spokesman for the Coast Guard. No injuries were reported.

The crash happened at the narrowest point in the waterway, leaving three-fourths of the port’s terminals inaccessible.

“Maybe if it was wider we could have got boats around it, but it’s not, so it’s a logistical problem,” Brahm said. “It’s a bad place for it to happen.”

There was no risk of electricity-related injuries or effects to the power grid, which is owned by Houston-based CenterPoint Energy, because lines in the area were deactivated prior to the crash for maintenance work, said Penny Todd, a spokeswoman for the company.

CenterPoint was in the process Sunday of moving equipment needed to clear the steel tower and cables from the waterway — work the company expects will be completed Wednesday, she said.

The 25-mile-long port complex is a major economic engine for the region and in 2009 handled more waterborne tonnage than any port in the country, according to the Port of Houston Authority.

About 60 ships carrying $322 million in goods and resources — ranging from crude oil to finished products in containers — move through the port each day, said Chief Warrant Officer Lionel Bryant, a spokesman for the Coast Guard.

19 miles closed

Items shipped through the Port of Houston move to and from destinations in every state, which could mean delays for companies with vessels in the water.

Those ships will have to drop anchor and wait until the steel electrical tower, which was propped up by the barges after the accident, is removed.

At least eight ships were waiting in an anchoring area outside the port after the crash. Five others were waiting to leave.

The Coast Guard closed 19 miles out of the 54-mile-long ship channel, leaving more than 100 terminals — including those for oil giants Shell and Valero — cut off from the sea.

Further delays possible

The few accessible terminals are mostly for container ships and will not be usable by most companies that would need other infrastructure for loading and unloading or that had planned to arrive at terminals north of the crash site, said Tom Pace, presiding officer of Houston Ship Pilots, a labor association.

Three days of backups could result in further delays, even as traffic begins moving through the port again, Pace said.

“It’s going to take probably three days to get everything back to normal after that,” he said.

Crew members from the towing vessel, the T/V Safety Quest, were removed from the boat and tested for drugs and alcohol.

It was unclear how the accident occurred, but the tower’s location has long been known to ship pilots who work in the port, Pace said.

It was one of six towers in the channel, but was the closest to the preferred waterway for traffic.

“The one problem is the tower’s really close to the navigable channel,” Pace said. “That’s probably one of the reasons it had happened.”

Staff writer Sarah Raslan contributed to this report.

zain.shauk@chron.com

Mariner Energy, which owns the platform that erupted in flames Thursday, has been involved in more than a dozen offshore accidents in the Gulf of Mexico in the last four years, including at least four fires and a well blowout, according to federal regulators.

This summer, the Houston-based Mariner paid $55,000 in fines stemming from inspections that turned up various safety violations. Four of Mariner’s accidents resulted in worker injuries; two of them involved fires, according to federal records.

Still, the company’s safety record does not rank it among the gulf’s worst operators, but underscores the inherent dangers of offshore energy prospecting and production: The tiniest spark can result in a catastrophic fire or explosion.

For example, a Mariner production platform caught fire in June 2009 after a methanol tank exploded during a welding operation. A fire on another Mariner platform broke out the year before during a routine cleaning operation.

The production platform involved in Thursday’s fire was set in about 340 feet of water about 102 miles off Louisiana. On average, it produced about 9 million cubic feet of natural gas, and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate a day, according to the company.

Mariner Energy is considered to be a small- to mid-sized independent offshore exploration and production firm, but one that was growing rapidly in recent years and showed a lot of promise, said Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University.

“They’ve had a fair amount of success, particularly in the deep water in the gulf,” Bullock said.

That success came after Mariner clawed its way back from the brink of dissolution in the early 2000s, when former energy giant Enron owned 96% of the Houston-based firm. A group of private equity investors bought it out of the Enron bankruptcy in 2004.

Two years later, using a complicated transaction and bolstered by Gulf of Mexico assets acquired from rival Forest Oil Corp., Mariner went public.

Four miles of the Houston Ship Channel will remain closed until the 56-foot tug J.R. Nichols, which sank Wednesday evening, can be removed. Five seafarers were aboard the tug when it sank. Four were rescued; one man lost his life.

U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Robert Cole said this morning that two or three tow vessels with fuel barges could not get underway due to the closure but that movements of larger vessels had not been affected.

T.J. Nelson, business manager for the Houston Pilots Association, also said that the closure has had a minimal impact on vessel movements because it affects only the uppermost reaches of the ship channel.

The 56-foot tug sank in the Houston Ship Channel near the Sims Bayou Turning Basin on Wednesday night, closing the waterway from the dock at Vopak in Galena Park to Sims Bayou, an upper stretch of the ship channel near the 610 bridge, Cole said.

Of the five seafarers aboard the tug at the time of the accident, four were rescued by workers at a refinery near the site, the Coast Guard said. One seafarer could not be found; his body was recovered on Thursday afternoon by TNT salvage divers. His name has not yet been released.

The Coast Guard said that it will not be able to determine what caused the sinking until after the tugboat has been raised. The tug had 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel aboard. At least 1,000 gallons of that were spilled in the ship channel.

According to Niels Lyngso, director of maritime affairs with the West Gulf Maritime Association, skimmers are on the scene and the spill has been boomed off and largely contained as of Friday morning. The Coast Guard said that an attempt to lift the tug will be made Friday. TNT Salvage will use the crane barge Curtis T to rig the tug for lifting and then the heavy-lift crane barge Big John for the lift itself. After the tug is secured on the barge the Coast Guard will survey for pollution prior to allowing vessel traffic in the area.