Ghost ships really do glow white. At least the wreck of the S.S. Jacob Luckenbach does—resting under 185 feet of water 17 miles southwest of the Golden Gate Bridge for the past half-century, it is covered with pale luminous anemones.

Salvage divers have been in close contact with this ghost since last May. They’ve been living with it. Their mission: map the broken vessel, find the bunker oil that has been periodically escaping to the surface, and then remove that oil, preventing further havoc to beaches and marine life.

In February this year, the Luckenbach was identified as the source of some of the “orphan spills”—small to mid-sized spills of unknown origin—that have plagued California’s coast on and off for years, killing thousands of murres and other marine life. The daunting effort to drain off and salvage the thousands of gallons of oil remaining in the cargo ship’s hold, so as to prevent further spills, began in May.

For much of June and into August, two “saturation” divers have been spending their entire time either on the seabottom working on the wreck, or above the wreck on the barge that provides their life-support. This gigantic cleanup job is a highly challenging operation, requiring close collaboration between the contractor and several agencies.

The Luckenbach is one of more than 140 ships that have sunk within the area of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary since 1595. The earliest recorded was the Spanish Manila galleon San Agustin, which sank in a gale while anchored in Drake’s Bay. Since World War II, with improved radar technology, there have been far fewer wrecks.

A 468-foot freighter, the Luckenbach was bound from San Francisco to Korea on July 14, 1953, carrying 475,000 gallons of oil, when it collided before daybreak with the inbound S.S. Hawaiian Pilot, a freighter en route from Honolulu. While navigating under foggy conditions, the master of the Pilot sighted a ship on radar and assumed it was the San Francisco Lightship (a precursor to light buoys for guiding ships to harbor), and made a slight course adjustment toward it. The approaching ship was actually the S.S. Jacob Luckenbach. Struck on the starboard quarter, the Luckenbach sank within 30 minutes. The Hawaiian Pilot suffered bow damage.

As later reported by the Marine Board of Investigation, the collision resulted from “wanton disregard, or otherwise ignoring, the applicable rules to prevent such collisions.” Neither captain plotted bearings to determine the course and speed of the other. Eventually, American Hull Insurance Syndicate, which insured both vessels, paid out its highest aggregate claim of the 1950s for the wreck, totaling $2,021,798. There the matter rested until 2001.

On November 24, beachgoers began bringing oiled birds, including murres, loons, and grebes, to the state’s wildlife rehabilitation facilities. Oiled birds were showing up, all at once, in San Francisco, at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, Half Moon Bay, Santa Cruz, Pajaro Dunes, Rio del Mar, and the Farallon Islands. In December, scattered tarballs were washing up on beaches in southern Marin and Monterey counties.

Wildlife casualties continued to trickle in through early 2002 along a 220-mile stretch of coast in what came to be known as the “San Mateo Mystery Spill.” Staff at the Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR) at the California Department of Fish and Game had been seeing similar mystery spills for years. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps due to the agency’s success in solving the T/S Command illegal dumping case three years earlier in the same area (see Coast & Ocean, Autumn 1999), OSPR staff worked aggressively to pinpoint the source of the spill.

The chemical fingerprint of the mysterious oil showed it could not have come from a natural seep, nor was it Alaska North Slope oil, the type commonly transported by vessels along the California coast. With the help of satellite imagery, one oil sheen was spotted, and by checking samples from oil tankers that had recently traversed the vicinity, OSPR ruled out illegal dumping. By a process of elimination, OSPR and the U.S. Coast Guard (known collectively as the “unified command”) determined that the oil must be emanating from a sunken vessel. Several clues, including the location of the sunken vessel, led to the Luckenbach.

By February 8, 2002, OSPR had confirmed that not only was the Luckenbach the source of the current spill, but also that this ship’s “oil fingerprint” matched those of at least three previous mystery spill events in California dating back to 1992. Chemists at the OSPR and Coast Guard labs were exhilarated to have finally resolved a number of troubling cases.

The U.S. Coast Guard sent an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) down to explore the wreck, then examined it further by sending three men down several times in a submersible. “Some of the submarine reconnaissance we did was kind of unnerving,” said Lt. Commander John Kaplis, Coast Guard Chief of Port Operations with responsibility for environmental response to the Luckenbach spill. “Very little was known about this wreck, and we had concerns about getting snagged on obstructions.” But they needed to know about hazards that might confront divers. “At times it was hard to make out where you were, unless you could make out something distinctive, like an anchor or a piece of railing. It was very difficult.”

Riding with Lt. Com. Kaplis and the pilot in the submersible was photographer Kip Evans, who had been hired along with Sylvia Earle’s firm, Deep Ocean Engineering Research, for this phase of the project. His job was to compile a photographic assessment of the wreck.

The first time they went down, visibility was so poor they couldn’t see the shipwreck until they were five feet from it, Evans said. “It was keeled over, cargo booms were extending sideways and sticking up from the bottom, cables were hanging from them. We explored the starboard side. We couldn’t explore the port side, currents were so strong they were pushing us into the ship.”

They also found that the wreck had become an artificial reef, habitat to a variety of marine species, including octopus, anemone, and rockfish. “We saw schools of hundreds of rockfish,” Evans said. Once, while navigating through a particularly dense concentration of krill in the water column, they turned off all their lamps. A lightshow of bioluminescence was revealed—a billion tiny stars in the surrounding blackness.

Laying Ghosts to Rest

On may 6, the Coast Guard announced the award of a $3.5 million contract to Titan Maritime, LLC, of Dania, Florida, to conduct an underwater assessment of the sunken wreck and remove any recoverable oil discovered within the fuel tanks.

It is probably safe to say that the saturation divers (two per team) who were eventually hired to rid the Luckenbach of its oil problem are complete strangers to the concept of claustrophobia. Connected via an “umbilical” line to a 460-foot barge anchored above the shipwreck, they have been working from a “dive bell” about the size of a small elevator in waters with an average visibility of five to 15 feet.

To minimize the risks of deep diving (e.g., nitrogen narcosis), saturation divers do not breathe compressed air as scuba divers do. They breathe a special mix of oxygen and helium dispensed into a helmet similar to that of an astronaut. To avoid risky and time-consuming decompression, they live at underwater pressures for up to 28 days at a time, confined at night to pressurized living quarters housed on the barge. They can spend hours in 45° to 55° F waters because their wetsuits are heated, but none of these features can protect the divers from the occasional strong currents and underwater swells on the seafloor.

Through a painstaking process of drilling (then plugging) tiny holes through the hull to test for oil, the “sat divers” have located 26 oil pockets, from 100 to 1,000 gallons, floating in the upper portions of many hold compartments. Of about 132,000 gallons remaining in the wreck, 12,000 had been recovered by August 1. Divers have identified the transit routes for escaping oil. At over five atmospheres pressure and frigid temperatures, oil trapped inside the ship has the consistency of peanut butter. To remove the oil, divers take aim with a steam wand designed to heat the oil to flow consistency and vacuum it up to containers on the barge anchored 170 feet overhead. During such “hot taps,” a ship deployed above the salvage operation is on hand with oil recovery equipment in case of any accidental releases.

As soon as the unified command agencies pinpointed the source of the oil, they started sleuthing for a potential “responsible party” (RP) to pay for the cost of the cleanup. Because so much time has elapsed since the original wreck, it now appears unlikely that a viable RP for the spill exists (the Luckenbach Steamship Company was dissolved in the 1960s). Therefore, current response expenditures totaling over $3.5 million are being paid out of the nation’s $1 billion federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund (Federal Fund), established by Congress in 1990 to prevent spills, improve emergency response, and reimburse states for damages uncompensated by an RP.

As of late July, 1,917 seabirds, mostly common murres, have been injured by leaks from the S.S. Luckenbach, and 86 percent of these have died. Only two, however, were added to the list between April and the end of June.

The investigation that pinpointed the Luckenbach was a successful team effort, bringing together experts and techniques from the fields of satellite imagery, oiled wildlife treatment, ocean currents, vessel operations, and oil fingerprint analysis. If the ongoing salvage operation has equal success, a blight affecting seabird populations up and down the California Coast will have been permanently removed. Steve Hampton, Resource Economist at OSPR, has indicated that the agency intends to test oil samples from feathers collected as early as 1978 to determine the extent of the Luckenbach’s environmental damage over the years.

But what of long-term effects from years, perhaps decades, of chronic oil-related wildlife mortalities from the Luckenbach? Hampton says the agency will seek compensation for this from the Federal Fund. A precedent-setting claim was initiated in 1998 resulting in over $300,000 to assess wildlife damages from the 1997–98 Point Reyes Tarball Spills, which are now known to have originated from the Luckenbach. The agency’s current plan is to apply to the Federal Fund again to assess damages from this latest incident, as well as all other incidents confirmed by fingerprint analysis to have originated from the Luckenbach since 1990 (federal law prohibits claims for damages occurring prior to establishment of the Federal Fund). Their ultimate goal is to combine all of these assessments to apply for a single award of Luckenbach restoration funds that could be used to restore seabird populations and habitat.

Steve Sawyer, staff counsel for OSPR, says “the dilemma is that these claims could set a precedent, and there are over 1,500 sunken vessels in U.S. waters, some with oil.” Whether or not the Federal Fund eventually pays for actions to mitigate long-term seabird population declines is a question that will be answered in the next two years.

For now, until completion of the operation in September, vessels traveling one of the main outbound shipping lanes from San Francisco Bay must avoid a safety zone of one nautical mile radius around the wreck site. Within this forbidden area, the Luckenbach is begrudgingly giving up its secrets.

Gregg Elliott has a master’s degree in public policy, and works for PRBO Conservation Science (formerly Point Reyes Bird Observatory). She usually gets early notice of oiled-bird events through PRBO’s Wildlife Processing Group, a partner of the unified command in cataloguing oil impacts on wildlife.