The Shell Arctic drilling vessel Kulluk has been grounded on a small island south of Kodiak Island since New Year's Day, while the inept Shell/Coast Guard/Alaska Dept. of Environmental "Unified Command" of several hundred overpaid bureaucrats and oil patch workers attempts to figure out how to get it off the rocks and back to Seattle for repairs.
For Alaskans that remember the Exxon Valdez disaster, this is a fresh reminder why we don't want drilling off Alaska's shores.
And tonight around midnight, my house shook violently for about 15 seconds. EARTHQUAKE! ran through my mind as I headed toward the front door.
It was short. I went back to the computer and headed straight to the Alaska Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which had a tsunami warning for the Pacific coast from the north end of Vancouver Island to Cape Suckling, near Cordova, up within 5 minutes. The coast including the area where the Kulluk is on the rocks wasn't included in the warning, just in an alert. But what if another earthquake bigger than tonight's 7.6 temblor happens tomorrow and a tsunami does hit the Kulluk?
As it happened, the tsunami generated by this 7.6 magnitude quake 210 miles from Juneau, about 60 miles south of the town of Port Alexander, south of the mouth of Chatham Strait, was very small, less than .15 meter at Port Alexandar. If the quake had lasted longer, or had triggered an underwater landslide like the Japanese tsunami, it could have been truly disastrous for the entire Alaskan coast, and the Kulluk could have been beached inland, where its fuel and lube oils could have seeped into the soil and landscape.
More about the picture below the orange spill absorber...
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