Freighter Off Belmont Shore Dragged Anchor to Oil Island Nearly Half-Mile Away

UPDATED with photos taken from the U.S. Coast Guard video already posted.

Unusual circumstances combined to drag an anchored Panamanian freighter, two football fields long, nearly a half mile into the rocky shoreline of a manmade oil island  off of Belmont Shore, the U.S. Coast Guard said Saturday.

The 624-foot cargo ship Ocean Sunrise traveled farther than would be expected because it was empty of cargo and fuel, having been ordered by the Coast Guard a week earlier to rid debris in its oil tank that might cause engine failure—and risk a runaway freighter in the country's busiest shipping port.

"Something lighter moves faster," First Class Petty Officer Adam T. Eggers noted Saturday, the day he videotaped the Coast Guard and Long Beach Harbor Patrol diving team inspections (see right). "There were other ships in that same area and they didn't drag anchor.… They were not empty; they had varying degrees of cargo and fuel."

Eggers had said Friday that a freighter running aground happens from time to time, but Saturday he added that nobody recalls it happening here in the relatively sheltered and waveless waters off Long Beach. Extensive oil and gas production operations are ever-present in the form of four man-made islands named after astronauts killed in the line of duty in the 1960s. Three of them are about a mile offshore. The most recognized, Chaffee Island, is usually aglow in peach and orange landscape lighting. The island that the freighter ran aground on, Freeman Island, is behind it, about a mile and a half offshore.

"It's very rare that this can happen inside a breakwater. There are designated areas in Long Beach Harbor where you can and can't anchor a ship of that size, and a lot of it has to do with the shipping lanes, including fast lanes, depth of the water," Eggers said. The anchorages also are assigned to pose no risk to environmentally sensitive plants or animals, nor to natural or manmade gas and oil pipelines that run like mineral veins across the ocean floor.

 "It seemed very unlikely," Eggers added, "that this would occur had the ship been full."

According to the Coast Guard, the Panamanian ship was loaded with general cargo just over a week ago when the Coast Guard boarded it for routine inspection at the docks and found debris that could cause mechanical failure in its oil tank, Eggers said. The ship was ordered unloaded and assigned an anchor, D3, from which it would need to get the tank cleaned in one of the many repairs served by specialized companies. The assigned location is .41 miles from Freeman Island.

About 25 crew members were on board the considerably lightened ship at about 6:30 p.m. Friday night when Ocean Sunrise went aground on the rocky ocean floor ringing the oil island, Eggers said. As is routine, the crew was tested for drugs within two hours after the incident. Inspections went on that night for any leaks but none were seen in the high-wind darkness. Tugboats towed the vessel off the rocks and it remained anchored at a location Saturday that is actually closer to the island than it was before, Eggers said.

Such vessels are equipped with equipment that measures ocean floor depth, informs the crew how much anchor chain to release and even shows a ''red halo" image of where the ship would be if it swung 360 degrees from its massive single anchor. Alarms sound to alert the crew that the ship has drifted and give enough time for it to either fire up its engines—which could take a half hour—or call for outside help.

Even had the Sunrise spun 360, the sweep would still leave a quarter-mile distance from Freeman Island, Eggers said. That plus the length of the anchor chain that would safely be 150 to 175 feet.Which is what made the circumstances fairly unique, he noted.

"We've got guys who've been doing this 15 or 20 years and they've said, 'Wow. That's a long way for that ship to drag anchor,' " said Eggers, who personally saw the ship and footage of its paint-scraped hull. There was no damage to Freeman, not even to shrubbery; it all went on underwater amid the smooth stones that cover the ocean bottom around the island.

An ongoing investigation will check for crew response, equipment failure and what was happening aboard the vessel at the time, and how personnel responded, Eggers added. The ship Sunday was anchored at D2, a bit closer to the oil island.

On the one hand, one mile offshore equals 12.4 lengths of the ship. On the other hand, Eggers said, "you've never heard of this ever happening here before, and there are a lot of ships moving off this shore every day.… It's among the busiest ports in America."