Officials find a surprise in old shipwreck — oil

OCEAN SHORES, Grays Harbor County — Scientists and engineers in rain gear crawled over the city's most famous shipwreck Thursday, poking holes in the hull and digging through what remains of rusted-out decks.

Forty-one years after the 229-foot S.S. Catala keeled over in high winds and buried itself on a beach frequented by sensitive birds, state contractors were finally assessing an ecological threat they had only just discovered.

The vessel has rested off Damon Point State Park since before Ocean Shores incorporated as a city in 1970. But it wasn't until April, when a beachcomber shoved in a stick and pulled out a tarry substance, that environmental officials learned the ship still carries a cargo of black goo — unknown quantities of oil.

"We thought, 'You've got to be kidding,' " said James Sachet, a spill-response supervisor for the state Department of Ecology.

"We had no idea."

They may have been the only ones. "Oh, I'd say just about everybody in town knew there was oil on that ship," said Bernie Paul, a volunteer at the Ocean Shores Interpretive Center, which has a special exhibit dedicated to the Catala.

"We just didn't know how much."

Built in Scotland in 1925, the steamer carried woodsmen and miners from British Columbia to Alaska before serving as a floating hotel in Seattle for the 1962 World's Fair. It ended up being towed to Ocean Shores to be a hotel for charter fishermen — complete with poker games and prostitutes — until it tipped over in a storm in 1965.

There the dead ship remained, besieged by looters, graffiti artists and partiers as it was buried in the sand, then exposed and buried again by Pacific storms.

"Lots of people spent a lot of time hanging out around that ship," Paul said.

Then in February, a powerful storm exposed more of the ship than had been seen in years. Then came curious new visitors, including the beachcomber who sent state environmental officials a photo of his oil-tarred stick.

The officials were delayed in assessing the oil danger this spring because snowy plovers, snowy owls, brown pelicans and streaked horned larks were migrating through Damon Point or nesting there.

This week, work crews expected to finish a series of investigations meant to determine how best to deal with the oil inside.

Sachet said diagrams of the ship suggest it probably had nine tanks, so it may hold as much as 20,000 gallons of bunker crude, a molasses-thick oil that can kill birds and marine life.

On Thursday, Robert Roe of Environmental Associates, a state contractor, helped finish 12 holes bored around the ship to send surrounding sand to a lab to see if oil already has leaked from the vessel.

"A visual inspection, so far, looks good," Roe said. "We see no obvious contamination."

Meanwhile, David DeVilbiss, marine-operations manager for Global Diving and Salvage, another state contractor, poked a silver dipstick through the hull, which a colleague wiped down with an absorbent pad. Another contractor used a backhoe to dig out sand from other parts of the ship. From the investigation, officials hope to gauge how the remaining oil is moving through the ship.

Later, contractors will build a computer model of the ship and try to make a final determination of precisely how much oil is aboard, and how to get it off.

The state should know how it will proceed within three weeks, Sachet said.

If the ship holds only small amounts of oil and is largely stable, workers may be able to cut holes in the wreck, vacuum out the oil, steam-clean the insides and excavate dirty sand.

But if there's a lot of oil, and large amounts have spilled into the sand, the state may have to bring in a huge crane and lift the wreckage away, a piece at a time.

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com