Cook Inlet ice floes present maritime hazard

January 13, 2006

DAWN DE BUSK\Frontiersman reporter

PORT MACKENZIE - Something as simple as an iceberg doomed the unsinkable Titanic on her maiden voyage in April 1912.

And the Edmund Fitzgerald, despite modern marine technology of the 1970s, disappeared from radar and sank out of sight during a sudden November storm on Lake Superior in 1975.

Many a vessel has been damaged and lives cut short while traveling Alaska's coastal and inlet waters.

Doing maritime business in the upper Cook Inlet can be a dangerous task, especially during the winter months, and Port MacKenzie director Marc Van Dongen said he'd prefer to work with the seasons rather than battle the elements.

&#8220Ice-breakers - that's a major expense,” he said.

Van Dongen has advised NPI, the company involved in exporting wood chips at the dock, to schedule ships for loading between November and March, and spend the winter hauling truckloads of wood chips, which could be stockpiled on the concrete pads on a hill above the dock.

&#8220We want to get them in a cycle where they don't have to risk having a ship trapped in the ice. It's between $12,000 to have a ship there for a day - from the dockage fees to fuel and wages for crew,” Van Dongen said.

In February 2005, the ship that christened the new deep-water dock, the Keoyang Majesty, did not complete its loading of chips before its Korean-based captain - whom Van Dongen said was unaccustomed to piloting iceberg-ridden waters - decided to barge the ship back to Homer and wait out the cold spell.

Van Dongen thinks scheduling ships during warmer months is the best solution to financial slip-ups and potentially dangerous problems such as damage to vessels or the $14.7 million deep-draft dock.

Ice may be present in the inlet in October, November or March. Depending on temperatures, accumulations there of small, floating fragments of so-called brash ice could make maritime operations more risky.

Two weeks of temperatures of minus-10-degree weather cause the ice to solidify. On the other side of the coin, it takes a couple of weeks of warmer weather in the mid-20s to flush out the ice, Van Dongen said.

&#8220We schedule ships' time of arrival to come in with the incoming tide so they're moving with the ice instead of against the ice. Same when leaving, ships leave with the outgoing tide. If it gets more than two feet thick, it's a problem,” he said.

Either the Kure and the Siam Ocean, two ships that arrived in mid-December, might have been delayed if they had showed up at the dock in early November when the Valley experienced a two-week cold spell before the pre-Thanksgiving snowfall, he said.

&#8220That's the risk you take when doing business in the upper Cook Inlet,” he said.

Contact Dawn De Busk at 352-2250 or dawn.debusk@frontiersman.com.