Date of incident: August 24, 1998.
Location: Islands of Oahu and Kauai, Hawaii.
Trustees:
Case status: In restoration planning phase.
Overview: On August 24, 1998, there was an accidental hose
failure at Tesoro Corporation's single-point mooring about one-half mile off
Barber's Point, near Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii. The mooring is a floating buoy
used to transfer crude oil and refined products from ships to shore. The bunker
fuel was being piped into the Oversea New York, a tank vessel that was also delivering crude oil to the Tesoro storage facility onshore. The oil spill was estimated at 10 barrels, or 420 gallons. Cleanup activities were conducted immediately following the spill. It was believed by Tesoro and the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) that the majority of the oil was contained and recovered at that time.
However, around September 5, 1998, tarballs and dead oiled birds began to come ashore on the eastern shore of Kauai. On
September 11, 1998, USCG used chemical analysis to match the tarballs and oiled
dead birds from Kauai with the oil from the Tesoro spill on Oahu. The oil was
originally reported to be coming ashore at Kauai's Barking Sands, Polihale,
Nukoli, Fiji, and Kipukai beaches. Based on these additional reports, Tesoro
officials estimated that as much as 117 barrels of bunker oil, or approximately
4,914 gallons, may have been spilled as a result of the April 24, 1998, hose
failure.
